More than two years after the Larry Nassar scandal rocked Michigan State University, the fallout continues to grow. On Wednesday, President John Engler, appointed a year ago after the scandal first hit, resigned after implying that some of the women whom Nassar assaulted are “enjoying” the “spotlight.” It’s the latest example of how the incident has turned into a full-on catastrophe for the university.
Scientists have long been flummoxed by the majestic rings that surround Saturn, but data from the NASA spacecraft Cassini is providing fresh insight into their existence and origins. Researchers now believe that the rings, which are about half the mass of the Antarctic ice shelf, are leftover shards from a cosmic object that disintegrated in the planet’s vicinity.
The shaving brand Gillette put out a new commercial to mark its 30th anniversary, reflecting on the hypermasculine ideals the company has at times endorsed. While the ad went viral and led to a wave of mixed reactions, Gillette’s decision to release it shows how the brand is trying to tap into social-justice-minded Millennial shoppers who are wary of consumerism and big business.
Evening Reads
(Benjamin Lowy / Getty / The Atlantic)
In a stunning piece, deeply rooted in history, the Atlantic editor Yoni Appelbaum lays out the nonpartisan argument for impeachment. Why start the process now? “The protections of the process alone are formidable,” he writes. They come in five forms:
The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin.
It isn’t just the coverage that changes. When presidents face the prospect of impeachment, they tend to discover a previously unsuspected capacity for restraint and compromise, at least in public.
Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.
(Andrew Kelly / Reuters)
Would taxing Americans’ income over $10 million at 70 percent, a discussion kicked off by the freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, discourage entrepreneurship and depress innovation? Derek Thompson argues no:
As John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve, once told me, economists can’t rule out the possibility that productivity has slowed down recently because “we picked all the low-hanging fruit from the information-technology wave.” If capitalist entrepreneurs want to pluck new fruits of innovation, he said, somebody needs to plant new seeds of scientific research.
The U.S. government used to do this well. Fracking, which has made the United States the world’s energy leader, came from federally funded research into drilling technology. The latest surge in cancer drugs came from the War on Cancer, announced in 1971. But the U.S. government doesn’t plant seeds like it used to.
(Sarah Wilkins)
What is it like to visit an existential therapist, who specializes in the weighty issues of the human condition, such as death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom? Faith Hill attended a session:
She laughed along with me at some of my more absurd anxieties; she even told me at times that she worried about the same things. At several points, she said, “You might not feel better after I say this,” or “Well, this isn’t comforting, but …” and proceeded to confirm my deepest fears. No, we can’t ever know anyone else’s internal experience. No, there is no objective meaning, and yes, we will all fail at times to create it. Yes, you will die.
Unthinkable
(Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty)
Unthinkable is The Atlantic’s catalog of 50 incidents from the first two years of President DonaldTrump’s first term in office, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance.
At No. 2: “Very fine people on both sides.”
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
John Crusius of Seattle, Washington State, writes: “Even more important, and even more unthinkable (although not attributable to this presidency), are the facts that virtually no Republican in Congress has challenged this president when any of these 50 events have occurred.”
Ann Ringland, of Durham, North Carolina, writes:“In New Bern, North Carolina, as he was looking at the aftermath of the hurricane, Trump said to a homeowner with a big boat in his front yard, ‘At least you got a nice boat out of the deal.’”
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s a familiar pattern: President Donald Trump’s Republican allies disagree with him on a major issue. They send statements and tweets, and repeat talking points on cable news. But will those in positions of power actually stand up to the president when they are at odds with him?
For Jim Risch, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a big test could come if Trump decides to withdraw from NATO, the military alliance with Europe that the U.S. has led for more than 70 years, as he has reportedly suggested he may do.
“There is zero appetite in the United States Congress to leave NATO,” Risch told me on Wednesday. “Fair statement?” he asked, turning to an adviser. “Maybe one voice,” the adviser joked. Risch amended his statement: “Almost zero appetite.”
Coming from a Republican lawmaker who is often portrayed as a steadfast supporter of the president’s, and who is now the most powerful shaper of American foreign policy in the Senate, it was a striking statement. But Risch made clear he wasn't going to get into a public war of words with the president.
“What puts you in a bad place with [Trump] is going out publicly and criticizing him,” Risch told me, “and I don't do that.”
An exit from NATO by the United States, which is by far the largest contributor to the alliance’s military might, was so inconceivable before the Trump era that the NATO treaty actually requires any departing party to give notice to the United States. The alliance has struggled to spread the burden of defense equitably among members and adapt to the post–Cold War world, but an American withdrawal could precipitate the collapse not just of the defense bloc but also of the U.S.-European alliance, inviting Russian aggression in Europe and calling into question the United States’ alliances around the world.
[Read: House Democrats want to investigate Trump’s foreign policy]
Risch’s remarks, which amounted to a subtle drawing of a red line, also stood out because the senator from Idaho repeatedly defended Trump’s approach to Russia during our interview. Amid reports that Trump has concealed conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin from even his closest advisers, and as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation continues, Risch said that he does not plan to issue a subpoena to the U.S. government interpreters who attended the president’s meetings with Putin in Germany and Finland, or to hold hearings to shed light on what the U.S. and Russian leaders discussed in those one-on-one sessions, both of which his Democratic counterpart in the House is considering doing.
“The president of the United States, like every president before him, has had private conversations with heads of state,” Risch said, “and people who are authorized to engage in diplomacy … need to have the free hand to be able to conduct it as they see fit … I trust that President Trump did not take every word that Putin said as uttered in good faith.” (Trump has said that he believes Putin’s denial of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)
On NATO, Risch didn’t commit to supporting proposed bipartisan legislation, which may be introduced in the new Congress, to prevent the president from ditching the alliance. (In the absence of such a law, which the White House could still fight in court, many legal scholars believe that the president has the authority to withdraw from NATO without consulting Congress.) “I don't want to go there yet,” Risch said, dismissing the prospect of a U.S. exit as mere “talk” and “speculation” at the moment. He (questionably) credited Trump with achieving through rough demands what he and other U.S. officials had long failed to accomplish with polite requests: European NATO members spending more on their own defense. But when I pointed out to Risch that he had once called NATO “the most successful military alliance in the history of the world,” he smiled. “That’s exactly right,” he said.
Risch oversees a 203-year-old committee with jurisdiction over everything from treaties and declarations of war to the president’s diplomatic nominees. And the positions he staked out on NATO and the Trump-Putin meetings are illustrative not just of how he may steer the committee, but also of how he and many other congressional Republicans appear to be compartmentalizing two distinct but interwoven issues: Russia as an adversarial actor abroad and Russia as a political minefield at home.
The senator, for example, described the defining challenge for U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century as fierce competition among the great powers: the United States, China, and Russia. He characterized the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election as an “enemy-like” action and Russian officials as cheats and liars, urging additional sanctions against Russia for its “horrific acts” everywhere from the Crimean peninsula to the British city of Salisbury. He said the only reason he didn’t join in an unsuccessful revolt this week by Senate Democrats and some Republicans against the Trump administration’s lifting of sanctions against three Russian companies, all partially owned by the sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, is that he felt the Treasury Department was rightly adhering to the letter of a 2017 sanctions law. A similar effort to challenge the lifting of the sanctions passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House of Representatives on Thursday, representing another rebuke to the president, but one that won’t force him to reverse his decision.
[Read: The rise of right-wing foreign policy]
Shortly before I met with Risch, Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had told me that Trump’s unceasing praise of Putin despite Russian misbehavior “doesn't quite pass the smell test” and necessitates congressional scrutiny. Yet when I relayed these remarks to Risch, he dismissed them as “political” and said he did not share Engel’s concerns.
As the senator sees it, while Russia has been a bad actor for a long time and must be countered, the investigations into the Kremlin’s interference in U.S. politics and potential collusion with the Trump campaign have caused the president’s political opponents to blow the threat from Putin out of proportion.
“Russia is getting an inordinate amount of attention,” he argued, despite the fact that its meddling in U.S. elections has been “ham-handed” and “China is a much more able competitor” that is challenging the United States “on every front, whether it's economics, whether it's military, whether it's cultural.”
Often, Risch’s stance on Russia has softened upon contact with the president. He has voted for sanctions against Russia and introduced legislation to protect U.S. energy infrastructure from the kind of cyberattack that the Russians perpetrated against Ukraine. But when Trump shared classified information with Russian officials, Risch directed his ire toward the “weasel” and “traitor” who leaked the conversation to the press. He sees no evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election or colluded with the Trump campaign. In the wake of Trump’s murky meeting with Putin in Helsinki last summer, Risch’s predecessor as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, angrily summoned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to a hearing to explain what Trump and Putin had agreed to. Risch, however, didn’t ask about the summit once during the hearing, instead praising the administration for its approach to NATO and Iran.
“The fortunes of the United States depend on [Trump] being successful,” Risch told me. “I want to do everything I can to make him successful. I don't work for him. I work with him.”
Corker might have believed that his public critiques would set Trump on a successful path, but Risch claims there’s a more effective way to get through to the commander in chief.
“I disagree with [Trump] from time to time. When I do, we talk about it, but I don't do it on the front page of the paper,” he continued, comparing his approach to him and his wife not arguing in front of their kids.
[Read: Trump wants little to do with his own foreign policy]
Asked whether Corker’s retirement and the passing of John McCain, another prominent critic of the president’s, had removed Republican constraints on Trump’s foreign policy in Congress, Risch rejected the premise of the question.
“The president's already constrained by his constitutional limits and the legislative branch is constrained by its constitutional limits,” he told me. “That is wishful thinking by national media that want somebody to stand up and punch the president in the nose … That is not my role.” (Of course, there is a middle ground between pulling your punches and punching the president in the nose, such as conducting oversight of the administration’s statecraft, which Risch promised to “take seriously.”)
A 75-year-old former trial lawyer, state senator, and governor in Idaho, Risch entered Congress in 2009 and boned up on foreign policy by serving on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees. He endorsed Marco Rubio during the Republican presidential primary in 2015 and ultimately voted for Trump even though he said that doing so was “distasteful.” While he seems sympathetic to aspects of the president’s “America first” agenda, he doesn’t come across as a Trumpian nationalist. Nor, however, does he appear to be an internationalist in the mold of Rubio. On the whole, he evinces a somewhat parochial outlook on the world, driven by national and local interests.
In discussing the issues he will focus on in his chairmanship, for instance, he has highlighted Idaho-centric concerns such as a Chinese company’s alleged theft of trade secrets from a Boise-based memory chipmaker and the renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty with Canada. He’s said that he won’t need to travel much in the role because so many foreign dignitaries pass through Washington, D.C.
Risch said that his first order of business, aside from working on confirming the administration’s diplomatic appointees, is to hold a hearing in February on the “challenges to [America’s] standing in the world.” Corker accused Trump of wrecking that standing by deliberately “breaking down relationships we have around the world that have been useful to our nation.”
But if Risch feels the same way, he didn’t say it.
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On this week’s show, Alex Wagner chats with Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer about the startling news of an FBI investigation that asked if President Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia.
Frank and Alex debate how exactly to explain President Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin: handler and asset or mere man-crush?
The news of the week didn’t stop there though. In the following days, it emerged that Trump has gone to “extraordinary lengths” to conceal details of his conversations with Vladimir Putin and that he’d even discussed withdrawing the United States from NATO.
Listen in for how to weather what feels like the documentary remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Is the president working for a foreign power? Can one connect the dots without leaving the walls covered in pushpins and red thread?
VoicesAlex Wagner (@AlexWagner)
Franklin Foer (@FranklinFoer)
It’s Thursday, January 17. The partial government shutdown is now in its 27th day.
‘Zero-Tolerance’ Policy: Donald Trump’s administration likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously thought since the practice of family separations first spiked in 2017, a new inspector general report finds. While administration officials had once denied that a family separation policy was ever official, it was revealed in 2018 that more than 2,000 children had been separated from their parents and placed in custody elsewhere, sometimes in facilities thousands of miles away from the border.
Tit for Tat: After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disinvited Trump from delivering the State of the Union, the president retaliated today by canceling Pelosi’s planned congressional delegation trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan. With tempers on both sides running high, the shutdown now seems even further from a resolution, reports Russell Berman.
Shutdown Watch: The federal-government shutdown is deeply unpopular among voters, but Trump and GOP senators don’t seem to care—they’ve grown used to representing only a minority of Americans, writes Ronald Brownstein.
Beto Watch: Beto O’Rourke hasn’t said if he’s running for president, but some Democratic operatives are building a campaign for him anyway.
—Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
Ideas From The Atlantic
(Benjamin Lowy / Getty / The Atlantic)
Impeach Donald Trump (Yoni Appelbaum)
“The United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order. That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed.” → Read on.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has the Better Tax Argument (Derek Thompson)
“When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this month that the United States should tax income over $10 million by 70 percent, it galvanized something unusual: a broad and substantive national conversation about the design and purpose of federal tax policy. No, I’m just kidding. It kicked off a lot of screaming about socialism, especially on cable news.” → Read on.
Barr May Do Exactly What Trump Wants (Adam Serwer)
“Taken as a whole, Barr’s testimony is less comforting than it seemed. Barr is a respected party elder who possesses the legitimacy, legal acumen, and ideological convictions to shield the president and undermine the rule of law without committing the sort of ham-handed errors that could turn the public or Congress further against Trump.” → Read on.
(Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty)
Unthinkable is The Atlantic’s catalog of 50 incidents from the first two years of President Trump’s first term in office, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance.
At No. 2: “Very fine people, on both sides.”
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
Readers told us:
“My specific addition would be his accusation that Obama bugged him late in 2016.”
—Scott Brown, Carmel Valley, California
“The list doesn’t address candidate Trump … but in some ways that list is even more worrying, because it demonstrates just how ugly the mood in our country has become.”
—Steven Coleman, Townsend, Massachusetts
A federal worker collects a free bag of groceries from Kraft Foods on the 27th day of the partial government shutdown in Washington, D.C. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters)
What Else We’re Reading◆ Is Trump Trying to Politicize Agriculture Data? Some Former USDA Officials Suspect Yes. (Christie Aschwanden, FiveThirtyEight)
◆ Why Bill de Blasio Is Acting Like a 2020 Candidate (David Freedlander, New York)
◆ If We Forget Appalachia’s Radical History, We Will Misunderstand Its Future (Kim Kelly, Pacific Standard)
◆ State Department Calling Employees Back to Work During the Shutdown (Nahal Toosi, Politico)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up for our daily politics email here.
She disinvited him from delivering the State of the Union during a government shutdown. He grounded her plane, abruptly canceling her taxpayer-funded trip to a foreign war zone.
Two weeks in, the relationship between the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and President Donald Trump is off to a smashing start.
Forget a swift resolution to the record-breaking shutdown: As hundreds of thousands of federal employees continue to work without pay, the two most powerful elected leaders in the country are locked in a duel of personal vengeance, making the possibility of good-faith negotiations to end the impasse even more unlikely.
On Thursday, Pelosi suggested that Trump delay his annual speech to Congress, essentially threatening to use her power as speaker to block him from the Capitol. (The State of the Union is delivered by formal invitation from lawmakers.) In response, the president was initially, and uncharacteristically, silent. No name-calling tweets, no blustery sound bites. But on Thursday afternoon, just as Pelosi was about to board a plane bound for Europe, Trump exacted his revenge.
The president fired off an icy-toned letter to Pelosi informing her that he’s postponing her week-long visit to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan—Pelosi’s first congressional-delegation trip during her second stint as speaker. “We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over,” the president wrote dismissively. “In light of the 800,000 great American workers not receiving pay, I am sure you would agree that postponing this public relations event is totally appropriate.”
[Read: Nancy Pelosi’s power move on the State of the Union]
Overseas travel to U.S. military bases, whether by the president or by members of Congress, is usually a closely guarded secret because of security concerns until the participants have landed safely at their destination. For that reason, Pelosi’s planned trip abroad—known colloquially inside the Capitol as a “co-del”—had not been publicly announced until White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent Trump’s letter to reporters.
Congressional operations are unaffected by the partial government shutdown because the appropriations bill funding the legislative branch was one of the few that had already been enacted for 2019. But because the military operates the trips that send members of Congress abroad, Trump has the authority to cancel them. “We approve all these congressional trips that use government or military planes,” a White House official told Roll Call.
The president’s decision, however, upended the lawmakers’ plans at the last possible moment. The House adjourned for the week on Thursday afternoon, and an Air Force bus carrying the members to the airport had already left the Capitol. Reporters spotted the bus, with the lawmakers still aboard, returning shortly after Trump’s letter went out.
Sanders told reporters that all congressional-delegation trips would be postponed during the shutdown—a decision that affects Republican lawmakers as well as Democrats, since most overseas travel is bipartisan. The Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said the speaker’s primary destination was Afghanistan, with a stop for pilot rest in Brussels, where she planned to “affirm the United States’ ironclad commitment to the NATO alliance.” The itinerary did not include a stop in Egypt, as Trump’s letter claimed.
“The purpose of the trip was to express appreciation and thanks to our men and women in uniform for their service and dedication, and to obtain critical national security and intelligence briefings from those on the front lines,” Hammill said in a statement.
The presidential retaliation drew a quick and surprising rebuke from a Trump ally who makes frequent official trips abroad, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “One sophomoric response does not deserve another,” he tweeted. “Speaker Pelosi’s threat to cancel the State of the Union is very irresponsible and blatantly political. President Trump denying Speaker Pelosi military travel to visit our troops in Afghanistan, our allies in Egypt and NATO is also inappropriate.”
As I wrote on Wednesday, the language in Pelosi’s letter was formal and polite, giving it the veneer of typical government communications. In his own letter, Trump never referenced the State of the Union address, but his sarcastic tone made little effort to hide his contempt. Trump belittled Pelosi’s planned trip as an “excursion” and “a public relations event,” and he suggested the optics of an overseas visit would be negative in the middle of a shutdown. The president, however, took his own taxpayer-funded trip to visit troops in Afghanistan over Christmas, after the shutdown had already begun. And senior administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are still scheduled to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next week.
Trump suggested Pelosi’s time would be better spent negotiating with him in Washington, but so far their talks have been unproductive: The president continues to demand billions in funding for his border wall, and the speaker refuses to discuss funding while the government remains closed. If their tit for tat over the past two days is any indication, the president and the speaker remain worlds apart, and the 27-day government shutdown remains far from over.
Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.
There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.
They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.
The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.
Given that Amazon controls about half of the U.S. online-retail market and takes in about 5 percent of the nation’s total retail spending, it’s encouraging to see pushback against the company’s hold on the market. But Dash buttons are hardly the problem. Amazon made online shopping feel safe and comfortable, at least mechanically, where once the risk of being scammed by bad actors felt huge. But now online shopping is muddy and suspicious in a different way—you never really know what you’re buying, or when it will arrive, or why it costs what it does, or even what options might be available to purchase. The problem isn’t the Dash button, but the way online shopping works in general, especially at the Everything Store.
“They sent the wrong tea lights,” my wife announced recently, after tearing open the cardboard box Amazon had just delivered. “It’s the wrong brand, and 50-count instead of 75.” This is not so unusual, actually. Amazon moves a huge volume of goods, and its warehouse workers are poorly treated humans, not just robots. Errors are bound to happen occasionally.
On top of that, Amazon is more than willing to fix its errors. In most cases, you can return an item for a refund or exchange with a few button presses on the website or in the app. And when Amazon messes up, as in the case of our tea lights, the company usually offers free return shipping, and even free UPS pickup, so you don’t even have to leave the house to rectify the error. These are some of the reasons Amazon consistently ranks high in customer-service satisfaction: The company appears to give people what they want, including correcting problems when they arise.
But a customer-service orientation masks how Amazon has changed consumer expectations and standards as they relate to retail purchases. At BuzzFeed News last year, Katie Notopoulos wrote about how terrible Amazon’s website is, prompted by its offering her a subscription deal for bassoon straps (a product Notopoulos reported needing to replace once every two decades or so), and a warranty for bottle brushes (which cost $6.99).
Notopoulos’s examples just scratch the surface of all the possible confusions that can arise when shopping on Amazon: Products are offered for “Prime” delivery, which is supposed to mean two-day shipping. But sometimes Prime means four days or longer. In other cases, one color of a given product—neoprene AirPods-case cozies, for example, which I recently purchased—might be available via Prime, but another might not.
[Read: How to lose tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon]
Even determining what’s available to purchase, via a keyword search on Google or Amazon, produces confusion far broader and deeper than the price fluctuations obscured by a Dash button. I recently tried to search for a heat-pump-compatible thermostat on the site. I got a litany of results, all thermostats for sure, but it was difficult to figure out which ones really worked with a heat pump. Eventually I gave up and resolved to visit Home Depot, which I still haven’t done. Another time, I tried to look for a 5-by-8-inch picture-frame mat on Amazon. But every other possible combination of mat came up instead: 8-by-10, 5-by-7, 8-by-8, 5-by-5. A hedge-trimmer battery I purchased came with a charger, but I didn’t realize it from the product description, so I ordered a duplicate charger as well—that charger arrived first, for some reason, and I had opened the packaging so couldn’t return it.
Apparel and other items with many options are particularly confusing. Determining if Amazon has the color-and-size combination you’re after for a particular dress or pair of sneakers can be disillusioning—as I write this, for example, Adidas Samba shoes are available for $72.95 in a men’s size 9 without Prime shipping, but for $57.58 in a size 12 with Prime two-day delivery. And because different configurations might ship from different sellers warehoused in different places, the chances of getting something different than you thought you ordered is high. As my colleague Alana Semuels has reported, Amazon is an aggregator of goods from various sources, which makes counterfeit products more common in some cases. In others, it can be hard to discern that some items sold by third parties on Amazon Marketplace, such as electronics or watches, are “gray market” products—authentic, but sold without domestic warranties or support. Cheap goods from China also proliferate on Amazon, some of which can be dangerous or duplicitous, from exploding USB chargers to perfume laced with urine or antifreeze.
It’s a far cry from Amazon’s beginnings as a retailer of books—“among the world’s most reliable, durable units,” as my colleague Derek Thompson recently put it. There’s no ambiguity about what you’re getting when you buy a particular book, CD, or DVD. But as the retailer expanded into the Everything Store it has become, it also changed consumers’ expectations about the experience of shopping.
[Read: I delivered packages for Amazon and it was a nightmare]
That brings us to Germany’s Dash-button ban: It’s difficult to know exactly what the product costs when you press the button to order it. Prices on Amazon sway up and down in mysterious ways, driven by computational pricing models that consumers can never see or understand. If configured to do so, pressing the Dash button can send a notification to the account holder’s smartphone, which can be followed to confirm pricing and cancel the order if desired. From the perspective of German law, this isn’t enough; the default behavior is for the purchase to complete, absent sufficient information.
But consumer-protection laws like the one in question only eke out marginal victories against the broader retail situation that Amazon inaugurated. The products available to purchase in the first place still feel arbitrary, as do their changing prices, their seemingly inconsistent availability and shipping times, the reliability of their arrival (thanks in part to Amazon Flex, the company’s gig-economy delivery service), and not to mention whether you actually get the product you ordered.
Amazon doesn’t necessarily agree that it has altered online commerce so significantly. “There is an important difference between horizontal breadth and vertical depth,” an Amazon spokesperson told me. “We operate in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition in each of these areas. Retail is our largest business and we represent less than one percent of global retail and around four percent of U.S. retail.”
But there’s a reason that we used to have shoe stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, bookstores, and all the rest: Those specialized retail spaces allow products, and the people with knowledge about them, to engage in specialized ways of finding, choosing, and purchasing them. On Amazon, everything gets treated the same. The problem with an Everything Store is that there’s no way to organize everything effectively. The result is basically a giant digital flea market. Amazon is so big, and so heterogenous, that the whole shopping experience is saturated with caprice and uncertainty. It’s not that Dash purchases alone might produce a result different from the one the buyer intended, but that every purchase might do so.
Saturn has confounded scientists since Galileo, who found that the planet was “not alone,” as he put it. “I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked-for, and so novel,” he wrote. He didn’t realize it then, but he had seen the planet’s rings, a cosmic garland of icy material.
From Earth, the rings look solid, but up close, they are translucent bands made of countless particles, mostly ice, some rock. Some are no larger than a grain of sugar, others as enormous as mountains. Around and around they go, held in place by a delicate balance between Saturn’s gravity and their orbiting speed, which pulls them out toward space.
Scientists got their best look at the planet nearly 400 years after Galileo’s discovery, using a NASA spacecraft called Cassini. Cassini spent 13 years looping around Saturn until, in September 2017, it ran out of fuel and engineers deliberately plunged it into the planet, destroying it. More than a year later, scientists are still sorting through the data from its final moments, hoping to extract answers to the many questions that remain about Saturn.
[Read: This is the way Cassini ends]
The latest findings, published Thursday in a study in Science, answer a fundamental but surprisingly evasive question: How much stuff is actually in those stunning rings? Estimates of the mass of the rings have varied wildly for decades, starting with the twin Voyager spacecraft, which whizzed by Saturn in the late 1970s and early 1980s on their way through the solar system. Even Cassini, nestled inside Saturn’s orbit, couldn’t provide accurate measurements until the very end.
For most of its life, Cassini’s orbit was outside both Saturn and its rings. “You got a combined mass of Saturn plus the rings, and there was really no way to separate it out,” says Linda Spilker, the lead scientist for the Cassini mission, who was not involved in the latest research. “Here was our first chance.”
In its last maneuvers, Cassini wove in and out of Saturn’s rings. The spacecraft was jostled by the gravity of the bands, as well as powerful winds emanating from deep within the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists used the data produced by these effects to calculate the mass of the rings. They say that the mass is about 40 percent that of Mimas, a moon of Saturn, which is about 2,000 times as small as Earth’s moon.
[Read: Microbes could thrive on Saturn’s icy moon.]
In more earthly terms, the rings are about half the mass of the entire Antarctic ice shelf, spread across a surface area 80 times that of Earth.
“It is the most accurate measurement of the rings of Saturn,” says Bonnie Buratti, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Cassini mission but who was not involved in the study. “The error margins are kind of pretty big—there’s about a 25 percent, almost 30 percent uncertainty—but it’s way more accurate than anything we’ve had before.”
The new estimate helps to answer another Saturnian question that has puzzled scientists: How old are the rings? For decades, the scientific community was split into two camps. One believed that the ring system formed when Saturn did, 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar system as we know it emerged from swirling clouds of dust left over from the fiery birth of the sun. The other suggested the rings were a youthful feature, formed only 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth.
The latest research bolsters the case for a more recent origin. According to current models, the more massive the rings, the older they must be, and vice versa. The new study suggests that the rings are less massive than scientists suspected, which means they’re also younger. The study authors say their new estimate, combined with previous research, suggests the rings are 10 million to 100 million years old.
There’s plenty of wiggle room in that range. Other analyses focused on the margins of error in Cassini data suggest that parts of the ring system may be as old as 1.5 billion years.
Still, most scientists now agree that the rings did not form alongside Saturn. This leads us to yet another unresolved question: Where did the rings come from? A primordial origin story would have been a very convenient one: The young solar system was a chaotic mess of flying debris, and it would have been possible for Saturn to lasso some of it into a lasting orbit.
Scientists now suspect the rings are the fragmented bits of a cosmic interloper. A moon, a comet, or an asteroid must have strayed too close to the planet. Trapped between two gravitational forces—one tugging it toward Saturn, and the other drawing it away—the object broke into shards. Over time, the pieces flattened out into a delicate disk. “It’s like a graveyard spread around the planet,” says James O’Donoghue, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who studies the Saturn system.
[Read: A new way to measure how fast the universe is expanding]
To truly probe the rings’ origins, scientists could use another Cassini. “If money was of no object—and it is a big object—you could send a probe over there and excavate a bit of the rings,” O’Donoghue said. “You could pick up the boulders and look inside them and really narrow down the composition.”
The youthfulness of the rings raises yet another question, Spilker said. “Were there other ring systems, perhaps that were older and then just, over time, slowly disappeared?” she said. If that’s right, the one we see now could be only the latest in a series of ring systems, the most recent victim of Saturn’s massive pull.
As majestic and eternal as they seem now, Saturn’s rings are constantly shedding material. Sunlight and other cosmic effects can transform idle, icy debris into electrically charged particles. In their new state, the particles are less able to resist the tug of Saturn’s gravity and become swept into its atmosphere, where they vaporize, “raining” water onto the planet. According to O’Donoghue’s research, this process dumps as much as 4,400 pounds of water onto Saturn every second. He predicts the rings will vanish in 300 million years.
If the thought of Saturn losing its trademark feature is disappointing, consider that there are others out there. Not just Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, which have very thin rings of their own, though they pale in comparison to the grandeur of Saturn’s. If there’s one thing that the study of exoplanets—planets beyond our solar system—has taught us, it’s that our planets aren’t special. Buratti is convinced that someday, with telescope technology powerful enough, we’ll make out the curves of the rings around a distant planet, in another solar system. There are other Earths, other Jupiters, other Neptunes, a cornucopia of rocky and gaseous planets coasting through the cosmos. Surely there must be other Saturns, too.
How could you market something that wasn’t real? That’s the question Brett Kincaid, a commercial director who helped promote the infamous Fyre Festival, is forced to confront in a new Netflix documentary out Friday. Titled Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, Chris Smith’s film is a fairly straightforward accounting of the failed event that triggered a maelstrom of social-media schadenfreude in 2017, when hundreds of attendees were lured to a Bahamian island for a luxury getaway that promised major musical acts, ritzy accommodations, gourmet food, and Instagram celebrities in the middle of paradise.
What visitors got instead was an empty corner of an island littered with disaster-relief tents that had been drenched in a prior storm. There was no other housing, no staff, barely any food, no way to immediately depart, and, of course, no music or celebrities. In Fyre, Kincaid offers a defense of himself and other contractors hired by the festival co-organizer Billy McFarland, who is now serving a six-year prison term for wire fraud. “Everything was real,” Kincaid insists in the documentary. “Everything looked real. If you get hired to do a BMW commercial and that BMW then has a faulty engine, how the fuck can you possibly know whether or not they’re going to do good on what they said they were gonna do?”
Kincaid is trying to explain how he and celebrities like Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, who promoted the doomed festival, became part of the initial publicity wave that McFarland devised to attract ticket-buyers. The experience featured in those commercials, which showed beautiful people frolicking on a beach, was a fantasy, pure and simple. In the documentary, Fyre employees acknowledge that the shooting of the promos, which happened over a joyful weekend in the Bahamas, was the closest anyone came to actually enjoying the extravaganza McFarland had advertised.
Smith is a documentarian who specializes in using the story of an intriguing person as a lens to examine some wider cultural phenomenon. His American Movie is a wonderful portrait of outsider art; Collapse is a thrilling exploration of the blurry line between radical thought and full-on paranoia; and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond dug into Jim Carrey’s warped experience with method acting on the set of Man on the Moon. Fyre is primarily a journalistic exhumation of the Fyre Festival’s ridiculous excesses. But via interviews with both dissatisfied ticket-buyers and nervy ex-employees, the movie also scrapes away the sheen of the flamboyant “influencer” lifestyle that McFarland leveraged to sell tickets and hook investors.
A rival documentary titled Fyre Fraud, released on Hulu days before Fyre was set to land on Netflix, makes that theme more prominent. While Smith’s film is more focused on McFarland’s management of the festival, the Hulu doc (directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason) is more bluntly polemical, digging into “influencer culture” as a broader societal symptom that McFarland exploited when marketing the festival. Fyre Fraud leans on montages and step-by-step explanations of how Instagram celebrities monetize their sponsored posts and how easily McFarland could use that network to create an event he had no qualifications to run. The Hulu film also has a strange animus toward Millennials and is fond of using pop-culture clips to explain simple concepts (Billions helps to define what a U.S. attorney is, while Family Guy outlines how a high-interest loan works).
[Read: Rising Instagram stars are posting fake sponsored content]
Fyre Fraud also features an awkward interview with McFarland that documentary producers paid for—somewhat deflating the movie’s invective against celebrities who translate their fame into promotional dollars, since the film arguably empowered McFarland to do exactly that. McFarland, who was not interviewed for Fyre (Smith said letting the organizer make money off the project would have felt “wrong”), is an undeniably compelling figure, a next-level scam artist who seems convinced that he can talk his way out of any accusation. But his involvement gives the Hulu documentary a particularly icky edge. The Netflix movie, in turn, was made in partnership with Jerry Media, which was also involved in the festival, and the Hulu film is much tougher on the company (for its part, Netflix has stated that Jerry Media never requested favorable coverage).
In general, Smith lets McFarland’s employees and contractors tell their side of the story, and almost all of them sound like people who recently came out of hypnosis. So many anecdotes revolve around them informing McFarland that some basic goal for staging the festival—like arranging housing, or travel, or food—was going to be impossible to pull off in such a short time. McFarland would invariably either ignore the news or convince workers that there was a positive spin to be put on it. He’d occasionally leave the office and somehow return with millions more dollars made from hoodwinking investors.
The story of the Fyre Festival is certainly one of perverse fascination. When it unfolded on Twitter, part of the thrill for observers was imagining the horror of people who had paid thousands of dollars for tickets and showed up to a windswept, mostly empty beach that they couldn’t escape. But Fyre is also a tale about how the delights promised by social media—think of those sun-kissed models running on the beach—are ephemeral and often illusory.
After the festival’s collapse, Fyre depicts McFarland’s next move with shocking, exclusive footage: The organizer holed up in a fancy penthouse with his friends, pondered how to capitalize on his failure, and then sold VIP tickets to events like the Grammys. McFarland made at least another $100,000 doing that (largely by exploiting the Fyre mailing list) before being sent to jail. Even in his seemingly lowest moment, McFarland went back to the same imaginary well of a glamorous lifestyle that anyone could have for the right price. He was hawking something that wasn’t real, and people kept buying into it.
John Engler was supposed to be a safe choice. He was a former Michigan governor and an alum of Michigan State University, and last January he was brought in to replace Lou Anna K. Simon, who had resigned following the Larry Nassar scandal. He was a Republican, and his board-appointed senior adviser was a Democrat; the board thought that would quell fears of overt partisanship. On Wednesday, Engler, not yet 365 days on the job, tendered his resignation.
The board was initially happy with its choice in Engler; the students and survivors of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, who pleaded guilty to criminal misconduct for molesting seven girls and was accused of assaulting more than 150 people, were not. Engler himself had been accused of failing to respond to allegations of sexual assault at a women’s prison while he was governor. “To choose someone like John Engler, it tells us that they’re learning nothing from what’s going on,” Natalie Rogers, a student and co-founder of #ReclaimMSU, told The Atlantic at the time.
[Read: The moral catastrophe at Michigan State]
A full year had not lapsed before the board was at Engler’s throat. In April, Kaylee Lorincz, who was sexually assaulted by Nassar, said that Engler offered her $250,000 to drop her lawsuit against the university. One of his senior advisers called the accusation “fake news.” In June, emails revealed that Engler accused Rachael Denhollander, the first gymnast to accuse Nassar, of getting a “kickback” for helping lawyers “manipulate” other gymnasts into coming forward. Eight days after the initial report, Engler apologized. Then, in an interview with The Detroit News this month, he suggested that some Nassar survivors might be “enjoying” the “spotlight.” Finally it was one comment too many. Survivors, students, and advocates fumed. The board, which had been fielding calls for his removal since he was appointed, called an emergency session. Individual board members voiced their frustration.
He offered his resignation before the board had a chance to fire him. In an 11-page letter sent Wednesday night, Engler laid out his case for how his tenure had made Michigan State a better place. “I sought to move with urgency and determination to initiate cultural change at MSU,” he wrote. This was a job, he added, that he did not want, but which he accepted to help a university that he loved as it faced a crisis. There were now 24-hour counseling services; athletic trainers now had to report to doctors rather than coaches; the incoming freshman class was the most diverse in university history. “The bottom line is that MSU is a dramatically better, stronger institution than it was one year ago,” he said.
[Read: Ex–Michigan State president charged with lying to investigators]
But even for the changes, Michigan State’s handling of the fallout from the Nassar tragedy has been a slow-rolling public-relations catastrophe. Since January of last year, revelation after revelation surfaced about the university’s handling of the Nassar case. The university claimed to hire an “independent investigator” to look into the case and assigned a university lawyer instead. An employee with ties to Nassar was also accused of sexual crimes. Simon was charged with lying to investigators. The number of applicants to the university dropped.
The board met on Thursday morning and voted to remove Engler immediately rather than allow him to serve until January 23, which he had requested in his resignation letter. The university must move on again. The crisis continues, and it’s become another interim president’s responsibility. Satish Udpa, an executive vice president at the university, has been tapped to take it on. The university is still looking for its next permanent president. But for now, as the trustee Brian Mosallam, one of the most outspoken critics of Engler, said during the meeting, the healing begins—again.
Science is sometimes caricatured as a wholly objective pursuit that allows us to understand the world through the lens of neutral empiricism. But the conclusions that scientists draw from their data, and the very questions they choose to ask, depend on their assumptions about the world, the culture in which they work, and the vocabulary they use. The scientist Toby Spribille once said to me, “We can only ask questions that we have imagination for.” And he should know, because no group of organisms better exemplifies this principle than the one Spribille is obsessed with: lichens.
Lichens can be found growing on bark, rocks, or walls; in woodlands, deserts, or tundra; as coralline branches, tiny cups, or leaflike fronds. They look like plants or fungi, and for the longest time, biologists thought that they were. But 150 years ago, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener suggested the radical hypothesis that lichens are composite organisms—fungi, living together with microscopic algae.
It was the right hypothesis at the wrong time. The very notion of different organisms living so closely with—or within—each other was unheard of. That they should coexist to their mutual benefit was more ludicrous still. This was a mere decade after Charles Darwin had published his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, and many biologists were gripped by the idea of nature as a gladiatorial arena, shaped by conflict. Against this zeitgeist, the concept of cohabiting, cooperative organisms found little purchase. Lichenologists spent decades rejecting and ridiculing Schwendener’s “dual hypothesis.” And he himself wrongly argued that the fungus enslaved or imprisoned the alga, robbing it of nutrients. As others later showed, that’s not the case: Both partners provide nutrients to each other.
Today, such a relationship is called a “symbiosis,” and it’s considered the norm rather than the exception. Corals rely on the beneficial algae in their tissues. Humans are influenced by the trillions of microbes in our guts. Plants grow thanks to the fungi on their roots. We all live in symbiosis, but few organisms do so to the same extreme degree as lichens. If humans were to spend their lives in the total absence of microbes, they’d have many health problems but would unquestionably still be people. But without its alga, a lichen-forming fungus bears no likeness to a lichen. It’s an entirely different entity. The lichen is an organism created by symbiosis. It forms only when its two partners meet.
Or does it?
Lichen-forming fungi all belong to a group called the ascomycetes. But in 2016, Spribille and his colleague Veera Tuovinen, of Uppsala University, found that the largest and most species-rich group of lichens harbored a second fungus, from a very different group called Cyphobasidium. (For simplicity, I’ll call the two fungi ascos and cyphos). The whole organism resembles a burrito, with asco fillings wrapped by a shell that’s rich in algae and cyphos.
For many, it was a game-changing discovery. “The findings overthrow the two-organism paradigm,” Sarah Watkinson of the University of Oxford told me at the time. “Textbook definitions of lichens may have to be revised.” But some lichenologists objected to that framing, arguing that they’d known since the late 1800s that other fungi were present within lichens. That’s true, Spribille countered, but those fungi had been described in terms that portrayed them as secondary to the main asco-alga symbiosis. To him, it seemed more that the lichens he studied have three core partners.
But that might not be the whole story, either.
Look on the bark of conifers in the Pacific Northwest, and you will quickly spot wolf lichens—tennis-ball green and highly branched, like some discarded alien nervous system. When Tuovinen looked at these under a microscope, she found a group of fungal cells that were neither ascos nor cyphos. The lichens’ DNA told a similar story: There were fungal genes that didn’t belong to either of the two expected groups. Wolf lichens, it turns out, contain yet another fungus, known as Tremella.
[Read: Is this fungus using a virus to control an animal’s mind?]
This isn’t entirely new. Over the years, other lichenologists have detected Tremella in wolf lichens, but only ever in three specimens, and only in the context of abnormal swollen structures called galls. “It was thought to be a parasite,” Tuovinen says. “But we found it in completely normal wolf lichens that don’t have any kinds of bumps.” Tremella is right there in the shell of the lichen burrito, next to the cyphos. It seems to make extremely close contact with the algae, hinting at some kind of intimate relationship. And it’s everywhere. Tuovinen analyzed more than 300 specimens of wolf lichens from the U.S. and Europe, and found Tremella in almost all of them.
Wolf lichens are among the most intensively studied of all lichens, so how could such a ubiquitous component have been largely missed? The problem, Tuovinen says, is that under a normal microscope, “the fungal cells all look the same.” She saw it only when she tagged the lichens with glowing probes that were designed to recognize Tremella genes. And she knew to do that only after finding those genes amid wolf lichen DNA. Earlier genetic studies, she says, might have missed them because they had specifically focused on the genes of the ascos. “There hadn’t been a reason to expect anything else based on the knowledge at the moment,” she says.
It’s an exciting discovery, says Erin Tripp, a lichenologist from the University of Colorado Boulder, but it’s still unclear what Tremella is actually doing. Most likely, she argues, it’s an infection, albeit a very widespread one. The alternative is that Tremella is a core part of the lichen. “This would, of course, be very exciting,” Tripp says, but to demonstrate that, the team would need to try to reconstitute wolf lichens with or without Tremella or, alternatively, use gene-editing techniques to disable the fungus and check how the lichens respond. “Without this sort of experimental approach, it seems premature to suggest that Tremella represents a third, fourth, or whatever-th symbiont.”
Tuovinen agrees that one shouldn’t overplay Tremella’s role. But she argues that lichenologists have too readily downplayed such organisms. More than 1,800 species of non-asco fungi have been described within lichens, and they’ve been labeled with terms that imply some kind of externality: commensalistic. Parasymbiotic. Endolichenic. Lichenicolous. If they’re not ascos, “we somehow just decided, without testing, that they’re parts of a lichen that can be excluded,” Tuovinen says. “We really don’t know that.”
[Read: The ex-anarchist construction worker who became a world-renowned scientist]
“Language matters a lot when dealing with these organisms,” Spribille, now at the University of Alberta, adds. “If we set up our language so that our definition of a lichen is fixed, and these other elements are extrinsic, we’re setting ourselves up to find that they’re extrinsic.” He thinks that researchers should move away from “the imperative of classification” and the compulsion to shoehorn organisms into fixed buckets. He suspects that the relationships between all the components of a lichen are probably highly contextual—beneficial in some settings, neutral or harmful in others.
That’s a lesson other scholars of symbiosis should also heed. There’s a tendency to categorize the bacteria within an animal’s microbiome as good or bad, as beneficial mutualists or harmful pathogens. But such labels imply an inherent nature that likely doesn’t exist. The same microbes can be benign or malign in different contexts, or perhaps even at the same time. Biology is messy—as are lichens.
Tripp agrees that “we, as a community of lichen biologists, need to revisit the role of all symbionts in the lichen microcosm.” No matter how one describes Tremella and other lichen-associated fungi, it’s clear that they do affect the form and function of the lichen as a whole. How they do so is “the great unsolved problem” of lichenology, says Anne Pringle of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Are the multiple species of fungi interacting mutualistically? With each other? With the algae? Are some parasites? Probably the answer to all questions is yes. Regardless, the data support an emerging consensus: Lichens are ecosystems as well as organisms.”
How many partners are there in a lichen? “I don’t know, but I think it depends on the lichen,” Spribille says. “I don’t expect there to be any one configuration that makes a lichen, a lichen.” That’s especially likely because lichens have evolved many times over, from different lineages of ascos that independently formed partnerships with different algae, over hundreds of millions of years. To expect them all to share the same basic plan is like expecting birds to be the same as fish.
They’re especially hard for us to understand because they’re so different from the organisms we’re familiar with. Unlike animals and plants, lichens don’t really have tissues. They don’t grow from embryos, and instead form through fusion. Different combinations create different forms—brittle or flexible, flat or round—and these traits are likely just as important to them as wings or legs or eyes are to animals. “We don’t understand their needs,” Spribille says. “In the absence of that, it’s difficult to say what kinds of configurations are within the realm of the possible.” And we can only ask questions that we have imagination for.
A government shutdown that most Americans oppose, on behalf of a border wall that most Americans oppose, might be the logical end point for a president and a political party that appears more and more unconcerned about attracting support from a majority of the public.
Donald Trump’s decision to precipitate a government shutdown over his demands for money to build a border wall, and the virtual absence of congressional GOP resistance to his approach, shows how comfortable the president and the broader Republican Party around him have grown in pursuing goals that face majority opposition in polls—so long as they retain the backing of their core supporters.
Attracting and sustaining majority support has traditionally represented a North Star for American presidents. The showdown over the shutdown, perhaps more than any earlier decision, makes clear that Trump is setting his course by a very different compass. Trump has abandoned any pretense of seeking to represent majority opinion and is defining himself almost entirely as the leader of a minority faction.
That carries big long-term risks for the GOP, as the Democratic gains in the House last November demonstrated. But because the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College disproportionately favors the older, non-college-educated, evangelical, and rural white voters who comprise his faction, Trump’s approach could sustain itself for years. And that promises a steady escalation in political conflict and polarization as Republicans tilt their strategy toward the demands of an ardent minority—and lose the moderating influence of attempts to hold support from a majority of Americans.
[Read: Trump’s wall could cost him in 2020]
Over the past 20 years, energizing the base has grown more important in both parties. In retrospect, the turning point might have been 1998, when Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach then-President Bill Clinton at a time when most Republican partisans supported the move but a preponderance of all Americans opposed it. George W. Bush consistently pursued goals, such as his second tax cut, that attracted virtually no Democratic support. Barack Obama passed the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote at a time when polls generally showed that, at best, only a narrow plurality of Americans supported the law.
But Trump has taken this concentration on his base supporters to unprecedented heights. Elected with only 46 percent of the popular vote, he is now the first president in the history of Gallup polling to never reach majority approval of his job performance during his first two years. In November’s midterm election, Trump’s approval rating among voters stood at 45 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. Attitudes about Trump almost completely correlated with the vote in House races: Republicans carried 44.8 percent of the total House popular vote, while Democrats carried 53.4 percent. The Democratic votes helped the party capture 40 seats, their biggest gain since the Watergate-era election of 1974.
Trump’s decision to shut down the government over the wall, and the widespread Republican acquiescence that followed, is especially revealing because it came in response to those losses. The GOP was decimated in white-collar suburban districts largely because swing voters who broke narrowly for Trump in 2016—particularly independents and college-educated whites—stampeded toward the Democrats.
That historic rout, centered in economically thriving places Democrats have rarely if ever won before, has understandably set off alarms among Republican strategists and consultants. “I can assure you there is a huge focus on what happened in suburbia: What happened between I-5 [on the West Coast] and I-95 [on the East Coast],” the Republican pollster Gene Ulm told me. “Nobody has missed that fact. That’s not lost on anybody.”
The small exception to that consensus might be Trump and the GOP leadership in the House and the Senate. Because in precipitating a shutdown over the wall, they have embraced a cause deeply unpopular with all of the groups that drove the Democratic gains in suburbia last fall.
In the latest round of national polls, at least 55 percent, and sometimes as high as 59 percent, of independents have said they oppose the wall. Opposition to the wall among college-educated whites has ranged from just over half, in the latest Quinnipiac University and ABC/Washington Post surveys, to 63 percent, in recent polls from the Pew Research Center and CNN. Resistance to the wall consistently runs above 60 percent among the Millennial and minority voters who also broke decisively toward Democrats in November.
In all, no recent survey has found that more than 43 percent of Americans support the wall. That suggests that, as with his overall job performance, Trump has made virtually no progress in broadening his audience since his election: In the exit poll on Election Day 2016, 41 percent of voters said they supported a border wall.
The shutdown is even less popular: In a PBS/Marist poll released Wednesday, 70 percent rejected closing the government to advance a particular policy goal, as Trump has. And by a consistent margin of about 25 percentage points, more Americans blame Trump than congressional Democrats for the impasse, according to roughly a half-dozen recent surveys. Trump’s overall approval rating has fallen to 37 percent in the latest surveys from CNN, Gallup, and Pew, and registered slightly above that in Quinnipiac’s poll.
The Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told me that throughout American history, it hasn’t been unusual for the political system to bottle up policies that most Americans support. One modern example is universal background checks for gun sales. Less typical, he said, is for political leaders to insist on driving through an idea, such as the border wall, that most Americans have clearly indicated they reject. “It’s mind-boggling to me that the whole Republican Party, with a couple of exceptions, has gone along with closing the government to spend money on something most people oppose,” he said.
The most striking aspect of the shutdown might not be Trump’s indifference to majority opinion: He’s demonstrated over and over that he is comfortable playing on the short side of the field so long as his core supporters are energized. Instead, this confrontation might be remembered as the moment that crystallized how much of the Republican Party shares his disregard about appealing to a national majority. As Mellman noted, only a handful of Republicans in either chamber have broken from Trump’s shutdown strategy so far, and even they have dissented only gently.
That hesitance might reflect several factors, including Republicans’ fear of generating a primary challenge by challenging Trump. But even more important might be the extent to which the GOP is now sheltered from the implications of majority opinion. Especially under Trump, the Republican Party is folding in on itself. It is growing more and more dependent on its core supporters and more reliant in both the House and Senate on strongly Republican areas where those voters predominate.
Just three House Republicans (Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, John Katko in New York, and Will Hurd in Texas) represent districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even more strikingly, just two House Republicans (Mario Diaz-Balart in Florida and Don Bacon in Nebraska) are left in districts that Trump carried by fewer than 5 percentage points, according to figures provided by TargetSmart, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. After the party’s suburban wipeout in November, more than 85 percent of House Republicans now represent districts that are whiter than the national average, and more than 75 percent hold seats with fewer college graduates than average, according to census figures.
In the Senate, just two Republicans are left in the 20 states that voted for Clinton over Trump in 2016: Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado, both of whom face reelection in 2020. Just five other Republicans hold Senate seats in states that backed Trump in 2016 but have voted Democratic in most presidential elections since 1992.
The remaining GOP senators represent states that have voted Republican in most of the past seven elections. And fully 44 of the 53 total Republican senators were sent to Washington by states that have voted for the GOP at least five times in the past seven elections. That orients the bulk of GOP senators toward the opinion of partisan Republicans—most of whom support the wall and using a shutdown to pursue it—rather than the nation overall.
[Read: Why hasn’t Trump folded?]
This narrow focus is self-reinforcing, because it virtually ensures that Republicans will continue to retreat from places where the Trump coalition can’t win. Not long ago, Colorado was a swing state. But in November, fueled by a powerful backlash against Trump among independent voters and high turnout among Millennials, Democrats won every statewide office for the first time since 1936 and captured both chambers of the state legislature. “The only thing comparable was the Watergate election of 1974, but even that wasn’t as bad, because we retained one statewide office and a one-vote majority in the state Senate,” says Dick Wadhams, the former state GOP chair. “So this was even more sweeping than Watergate.”
Wadhams says he can imagine a scenario where Republicans recover in Colorado for 2020 if Democrats pick a presidential nominee too liberal for the state’s swing voters. But he sees no signs that Trump will expand the coalition supporting him or the GOP in the state. Trump’s focus on satisfying a distinct minority, Wadhams says, “is problematic with a state like Colorado, with the kind of electorate we have, the dynamic electorate we have, the huge numbers of people who are moving here.”
John Thomas, a Republican consultant who works in Orange County, California—where the GOP was swept in last year’s House races—takes a similar view. He sees several dynamics that could allow Republicans to recover in the longtime conservative bastion in 2020, including overreach by House Democrats, especially on spending, and less intense fundraising from donors for House races during a presidential year. But he concedes that none of those factors might matter much if Trump continues to alienate the region’s diverse and well-educated voters. It “really comes down to, What do you think about Trump?” Thomas says.
Winning without majority support is becoming a way of life for the GOP. Republican presidential candidates (Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016) have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote in two of the past five presidential elections, after the country had experienced such a split only three times in the previous 200-odd years. Everything Trump has done in office—and especially with the shutdown—suggests that he’s comfortable trying to squeeze out another Electoral College victory without winning the popular vote. And given the GOP’s continued erosion in blue California, and the Democrats’ growing competitiveness in red-leaning Texas, the odds of Trump winning the popular vote in 2020, even if he is reelected, seem very small, according to many experts in both parties.
In the Senate, the GOP’s reliance on small states less touched by demographic and cultural change has allowed it to hold most seats even if it doesn’t win most votes nationwide. (One comprehensive recent study found that 2017 was the first time in the chamber’s history that the senators who approved passed legislation and nominations represented less than half of the country’s population.) Even in the House, gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in large urban areas has muffled the GOP’s exposure to national opinion, though the party’s collapse in suburbia overwhelmed those defenses last fall.
The extended stalemate over the shutdown, despite the clear signals from polls, offers a powerful gauge of how much more turbulent politics might become if the GOP concern about majority opinion continues to dwindle. And the more Republicans sublimate that opinion to efforts to mobilize their base, the more pressure will grow from Democrats who want their party to follow the same model the next time it holds the White House. Trump is demonstrating how quickly extremism can flourish once a president abandons even the aspiration of representing a majority of Americans. The shutdown is unlikely to provide the last, or even the most damaging, example of where that can lead.
Impeachment is a powerful tool. The time to wield it is now, argues the Atlantic senior editor Yoni Appelbaum. In the latest Atlantic Argument, Appelbaum invokes Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868 to make the case for democratically removing President Donald Trump from office. Appelbaum underscores that this measure is not meant to resolve a policy dispute; rather, it is an attempt to rectify the problem of Trump’s inability to discharge the basic duties of his office.
“The president is unfit for the office he holds,” Appelbaum says in the video. “Congress needs to act now and open an impeachment inquiry.”
For more, read Appelbaum's Atlantic article, “The Case for Impeachment.”
LONDON—Early on in Brexit, Channel 4 and HBO’s almost inappropriately entertaining movie about Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, we flash back in time to 1975, when ordinary citizens are being interviewed about another historic referendum on Europe. “I don’t really know what I’m voting for,” one voter sheepishly confesses. “I don’t really see what good it’s going to do us,” another adds, somewhat huffily.
Here, in a nutshell, is the perpetual nature of Britain’s relationship with the EU. It’s confused. Cranky. Doggedly pessimistic. And things have only gone downhill since then. In the two and a half years since 52 percent of the nation voted to leave the world’s largest trading bloc, the debate over Brexit has become the Groundhog Day no one can wake up from, with its recriminations and unsolvable paradoxes and parliamentary chaos. Even the reality that Britain is lurching painfully but certainly toward financial free fall if no agreement for leaving emerges before March 29 hasn’t shifted the political mechanisms out of gridlock. It’s a polarizing, infuriating, exhausting mess.
How, you might ask, does someone make a decent movie out of that?
It helps that the director of Brexit is Toby Haynes, who’s handled similarly tense and nightmarish scenarios in episodes of Black Mirror and Sherlock. The inscrutably magnetic starring presence of Benedict Cumberbatch is another mitigating factor. But really, the man pulling magic from national meltdown is James Graham. The genial 36-year-old playwright is beyond rising-star status at this point, having seen two of his plays run simultaneously in the West End last year: Ink, a drama about a young Rupert Murdoch that arrives on Broadway in April, and Labour of Love, which charted the state of one of Britain’s main political parties over 27 years. Graham, The Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote in his review of the latter, “has a rare capacity to recreate pivotal moments from our past.” But as Brexit demonstrates, he also has an uncanny gift for writing history in real time, tuning out the noise and lasering in on the most vital elements of the story.
This is, he tried to explain to me in a phone interview hours before Prime Minister Theresa May’s calamitous Brexit vote in Parliament on Tuesday (spoiler: she lost), not such a novel thing. “It’s what Shakespeare did, what the poets have always done,” he said. “You put human beings against the backdrop of nation-changing events, and the personal and the political begin to speak to each other, and make sense of each other through the juxtaposition.” Simple. But Shakespeare, not to disparage him, wasn’t dealing with a story involving emerging algorithms, behavioral micro-targeting, and allegations of campaign-finance transgressions that are still being investigated. That Graham has managed to make a functioning drama out of Brexit, let alone such a riveting one, feels a little bit miraculous.
Possibly it’s because he foregrounds a side of the story—and a crucial player—about which remarkably little has been said. Cumberbatch plays Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave (the government-designated official campaign in favor of leaving the EU). A balding, sandy-haired eccentric in a high-visibility cycling vest, Cummings—Brexit argues—is actually a sophisticated architect of chaos, the shadowy Blofeldian author of so much political pain. “In a different branch of history, I was never here,” Cummings tells the camera early in the film. “Some of you voted differently and this never happened.” But since it did, he’s here to explain. “Everyone knows who won, but not everyone knows how.”
The story that comes next follows Graham’s pattern for making political dramas sing: With Cummings as a fascinating and oddly beguiling central character, he delves into the historical texture of the Brexit referendum, structuring events around a compelling dramatic narrative. The story is set within a tight timeline: the 10 months leading up to the 2016 referendum, bookended by flash-forwards to 2020, when Cummings is being quizzed for a public inquiry. Initially, at least, Vote Leave is seen as a renegade force, facing off against the full might of David Cameron’s Conservative government, which endorsed the campaign to remain. Cummings’s counterpart on the other side is Craig Oliver (Black Mirror’s Rory Kinnear), a political strategist and former journalist who’s as well connected as Cummings is disliked (Oliver describes Cummings in the film as “basically mental” and “an egotist with a wrecking ball”).
Cummings is cast in the underdog role, giving Brexit the space to chart his unlikely but inevitable triumph. Rarely, though, are viewers expected to be on his side. Graham stays defiantly nonpartisan throughout, even if he heightens the three most bombastic media presences of the pro-Brexit debate—the politicians Nigel Farage (Paul Ryan) and Boris Johnson (Richard Goulding), and the businessman and political donor Arron Banks (Lee Boardman)—into caricatures, a Greek chorus of squirm-inducing comic relief. Rather than presenting a polemic or an argument, Graham said he wanted instead to consider a significant moment in British history while allowing his audience to “invest in and empathize and understand the motivations of the key players,” which he sees as vital, even more so if you happen to stringently disagree with their politics.
When the trailer for Brexit was released in December, it sparked criticism from some commentators perturbed by the fact that Graham was tackling both a colossal national crisis that was still very much ongoing and allegations of criminal activity that haven’t yet been fully litigated. (Vote Leave was found last year to have broken electoral law by overspending, while the question of where Banks got the £8.4 million he donated to the pro-leave cause has been referred to the National Crime Agency.) Graham found the criticism a little perplexing. “I believe passionately that the right time to be doing plays and films and TV dramas about politically sensitive events,” he said, “is when you’re right in the epicenter of them.” Brexit isn’t intended to be the definitive account of how Brexit unfolded, but rather the beginning of a larger artistic reckoning with what it all means.
Given the ongoing uncertainty regarding Brexit, the timeliness of Brexit also gives the drama more potency. The movie has already aired in the United Kingdom, where it was met almost exclusively with critical acclaim (though a reviewer for the left-leaning publication The Guardian took umbrage with the ambiguous centrality of Cummings, calling the film “superficial, irresponsible TV”), and was watched by more than 1 million viewers. Which, as Cummings would attest, is no small number of people to reach when you’re in the middle of one of the most charged, divisive, and apparently unending decisions in British history.
If you ever find yourself sinking into the plush blue couch of Dr. Jane Prelinger, you should know that she doesn’t want you to call her Dr. Prelinger. In her office, even when you’re on the couch and she’s facing you from her chair, looking at you through heavy eyeliner and the frame of her white-blond bangs, she insists: You’re just two humans. “It’s Faith and Jane,” she told me when I was in that position. “Here, it’s human to human.”
Jane is an existential therapist. She sees a lot of different clients with a lot of different problems, but she thinks all of those problems can be reduced to the same four essential issues: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
Existential therapy isn’t new. Its roots go back to the existential philosophers of the 20th century, and specifically to Jean-Paul Sartre, who summed up his philosophy in 1943 when he wrote that humans are “condemned to be free.” Unlike other animals, humans are conscious and aware of their own mortality—but that means they have the possibility, and responsibility, of deciding in each moment what to do and how to be.
[Read: What your therapist doesn’t know]
Existential philosophy evolved into a methodology in the postwar years, as therapists in different corners of the globe began using its principles to inform their practice: After being freed from a concentration camp, Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946, and coined logotherapy as a method of creating meaning. Rollo May brought this European perspective to America in the 1950s, giving it a more optimistic flair focused on the vastness of human potential, and called it the “existential-humanistic” approach. And in 1980, Irvin Yalom defined the four “givens” of the human condition—death, meaning, isolation, and freedom—that have become the basis for the field. Today there remain several different branches of existential therapy, but they all help clients face existential givens head on so that they can move toward a more “authentic” and free existence.
Orah Krug, an existential therapist and the director of clinical training at the Existential Humanistic Institute in San Francisco, gave me an example of how existential therapy can help. She had a client who was eating lunch with her daughter when a car crashed right into the room. No one was badly hurt, but for years the client couldn’t let go of her anger at the driver—until Krug helped her realize that she wasn’t just angry at the driver. She was angry that she had no control to stop bad things from happening. “And here’s the place where she got to that deep acknowledgement … We cannot protect ourselves from life’s vicissitudes,” Krug told me. “They just happen. And to pretend that we can is dangerous.”
I tend to ruminate heavily—too heavily—on the existential. I worry constantly that my life isn’t meaningful, that I’m not putting my limited years to good use, that I could be doing more, that I could be more. It’s in between the busy moments—after I finish a task, or say goodbye to a friend, or wake up before my alarm in the dark hours of the morning—that I feel it most: time slipping through my fingers.
I was immediately intrigued when I first heard about existential therapy. But when my editor suggested I actually go to an existential-therapy session myself, I found I was secretly eager to see if it could really help me, as a person and not just as a journalist.
When I stepped into Jane’s small office, I felt like I was entering someone’s home; the floor was carpeted, the lighting warm. After I sat down stiffly in Jane’s rather Freudian chaise, she asked me what I’d like to talk about.
[Read: The virtues of isolation]
I told her that lately my anxiety about time passing has been getting worse; that I’m in my 20s, and finding myself in the midst of a quarter-life crisis—trying to figure out what makes a meaningful life, debating what I should prioritize, aware that any small decision could change my entire course; that I obsessively scan Wikipedia pages to see how old my favorite writers were when they first published.
I told her how isolated those fears make me feel, even though I know my friends are grappling with similar concerns. And because I was seeing an existential therapist, after all, I let myself really dive into that. “I can’t get around the fact that we’re all trapped in our own heads,” I said. “That I can never really access any one else’s internal experience.”
Jane guided the session gently. She asked clarifying but fairly typical follow-up questions: How long have you felt that way? And are you close to your mother? What about your relationships with friends? But then she’d reel me back to the big-picture questions—some of which caught me off guard, precisely because they were things I think about all the time. “How would you describe your own identity?” she asked at one point. “Not in terms of how other people see you, but in terms of who you feel you are, internally.”
She laughed along with me at some of my more absurd anxieties; she even told me at times that she worried about the same things. At several points, she said, “You might not feel better after I say this,” or “Well, this isn’t comforting, but …” and proceeded to confirm my deepest fears. No, we can’t ever know anyone else’s internal experience. No, there is no objective meaning, and yes, we will all fail at times to create it. Yes, you will die.
Occasionally, Jane would stop and ask what I was feeling in that moment. It was a way of sticking to the idea of “presence” that is so essential to existentialists: that you have a responsibility to show up to your life. You can’t avoid it, in all its pain and beauty, by living in the past—personal histories and buried traumas matter, and they might inform the present, but it won’t do to dwell on them.
And that was it. For an hour, I talked about what it was like for me to be human, and why it often feels so hard. There were no answers—Jane didn’t give me any tips for processing mortality, or ways to make my life feel more meaningful. She didn’t tell me I had a purpose, or that I should strengthen connections with friends, or to tell my parents I loved them. After the session ended, I talked with Jane for a bit about her approach. “Part of the existential is just acknowledging That ship has sailed,” she said. “A lot of it is mourning. You mourn these realities so that you can move toward relinquishing them.”
Existential therapy has slowly been gaining recognition; in 2016, there were 136 existential-therapy institutions in 43 countries across six continents, and existential practitioners in at least 48 countries worldwide. Recent studies have supported the use of existential therapy for patients with advanced cancer, incarcerated individuals, and elderly people residing in nursing homes, among others; a number of meta-analyses have gathered data on its effectiveness. And when I spoke directly to existential therapists, they reported a significant rise in clients in recent years—and a notable increase in existential distress among them.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described a similar kind of culture-wide existential hunger. He called it the “existential vacuum”: “a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century,” he wrote, resulting from the technological developments of modern society. He believed that the conveniences of the Industrial Revolution had actually given people a harmful surplus of leisure time, leaving them purposeless, sad, and bored. “Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression, and addiction,” he wrote, “are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.”
[Read: Americans are dying from suicide]
Now, 72 years later, rates of suicide are higher than they’ve ever been before; in the United States, suicide rates rose in all but one state (Nevada) from 1999 to 2016. Social isolation, too, is on the rise; a recent survey of 20,000 American adults found that “most Americans are considered lonely,” and that two-fifths feel they are “isolated from others.” A new poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that nearly four in 10 U.S. adults are more anxious now than they were at the same time last year.
Clay Routledge, a researcher at North Dakota State University who studies existential psychology, believes Americans are experiencing a “crisis of meaninglessness.” Historically, he told me, Americans have turned to organized religion “not just because it provides this belief structure that you exist for a purpose, but also for community, social connections, and support.” Now Americans are increasingly dropping religion, often for more individualized spiritual pursuits. Routledge told me this can leave people feeling empty. “In religion, people find it comforting to be part of a group that’s been around for a long time,” he said. “There’s continuity—it’ll be there after you’re gone.” Routledge noted that in his own research, subjects primed to think about death get most anxious when they don’t see themselves as part of a bigger collective identity.
Existential despair has crept into the political realm, too. Many Americans are losing faith in political institutions, polarization is growing, and people therefore feel less hope and trust in others. And it’s not just the United States that is feeling the existential vacuum; global threats such as climate change, increasing automation, and globalization are all changes, happening rapidly, that make life feel profoundly uncertain. “I’ve never had more people come in bringing the world into the room than I do now,” Krug, of the Existential Humanistic Institute, told me. “And specifically talking about their anger, their powerlessness, their sense of—their world feels turned upside down.”
[Read: Trust is collapsing in America]
Even today, though, the existential approach remains somewhat on the fringe of psychotherapy. There have been relatively few controlled studies comparing it with other methods—in part because existential therapists themselves are often reluctant to test it. Mick Cooper, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Roehampton, told me that in existential therapy, “there’s a focus on the unique qualities of the individual … it’s very critical of a more mechanistic perspective, and existential therapists are fairly wary of things like control trials.” In the United Kingdom, where Cooper practices, existential therapists have a hard time getting funded by or employed within the National Health Service; the government is naturally reluctant to pay for something if they don’t know that it works.
But Louis Hoffman, a co-founder of the International Institute of Existential-Humanistic Psychology, sees it differently. “When you look at all the different primary components of existential therapy, there’s actually very broad, robust research supporting its efficacy,” he told me. Many studies have shown, for instance, that a sense of meaning contributes to psychological well-being, and that meaning-centered psychological interventions can help.
Hoffman feels confident that the field is going to keep growing. This May, the second World Congress of Existential Therapy will be held in Buenos Aires, gathering practitioners from all over the globe; the theme will be “Anxiety and Guilt in Times of Change.” Cooper, for his part, still doubts that existential therapy will ever be a mainstream approach. “It talks about subjects that not everyone wants to talk about, like death, meaning, limitations … It’s not exactly upbeat,” he told me.
Even when I was talking to Jane about those darker subjects, though, it didn’t really feel heavy; it just felt good to get them out in the open. “Existentialism can be so much fun, especially when you let yourself laugh,” Jane told me, chuckling. “We go through all this agony, just to die at the end!” When our time was up, Jane ended it directly and firmly. This was part of the approach, she told me—you have to be honest about things. “I don’t want to deny that things end brutally,” she said. “I can’t collude with the idea that there’s all the time in the world.”
I left the office then, out of the double doors and into the misty afternoon. It was cold for September, but I wanted to walk the hour home. I still had all the same existential concerns—the fear of time, the loneliness, all the myriad uncertainties. But I felt a little lighter, having had these anxieties listened to, and validated. It was a bit like coming across a line in a poem or a quote in a book that you relate to on an eerily intimate level—something of your most personal experience mirrored back to you, and you realize all at once that someone else has had the very same thought. Suddenly and certainly, if only for that moment, you are a little less alone.
He’s running—or they hope he is, and for now at least, they’ll settle for a shot of him running in a new web video they’re putting out Thursday to try to drum up support and convince Beto O’Rourke that the movement is really there, waiting for him.
Out of a shared office space in Brooklyn and through a network of phone calls and emails, political operatives behind a group called Draft Beto have raised $20,000 from 450 donors and parked the money in an account waiting for the former congressman and Senate candidate from Texas to announce a presidential campaign, probably on Facebook Live, his preferred outlet. The email list is already up to 6,000. House parties have been going on for the past few weeks.
For someone who would get into a presidential race without much buildup or preparation, that could be an important head start.
“What we’re doing,” said Boyd Brown, a former South Carolina state legislator and active Democrat who’s now working with the group, “is essentially building a campaign to hand over to him in the event he runs.”
[Read: Beto O’Rourke’s national celebrity was his undoing]
O’Rourke and a small circle of aides and friends have been reaching out to operatives around the country as he gauges whether there really is an appetite for a presidential run that six months ago would have seemed like a ridiculous joke and now seems like one he could enter as a front-runner. Meetings are being brokered, connections being made for people to have what-if conversations about how it might work.
“I think Beto’s really having a hard time making a decision, and he’s surprised at how hard it is,” said Garry Mauro, the last Democrat to be elected statewide in Texas (in 1994, as land commissioner) and someone who’s been in touch with O’Rourke recently.
There has been no official contact, but Mauro said O’Rourke is clearly registering how excited people remain about him, and he and his team are aware of Draft Beto. “I don’t think for one second that the Draft Beto movement is going unnoticed and doesn’t have impact. Of course it does. How could it not?”
O’Rourke didn’t respond to a phone call or questions sent by text about what he makes of Draft Beto and whether the group’s existence is indeed informing his decision. He’s on a road trip, by himself, eating blackberry cobbler and crashing in motels, having conversations, and then posting Bukowski-style essays about what he sees.
“Have been stuck lately. In and out of a funk. My last day of work was January 2nd,” he wrote on Medium on Wednesday. “It’s been more than twenty years since I was last not working. Maybe if I get moving, on the road, meet people, learn about what’s going on where they live, have some adventure, go where I don’t know and I’m not known, it’ll clear my head, reset, I’ll think new thoughts, break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in.”
For someone who became a national sensation speaking off-the-cuff and from the heart, O’Rourke has become an enigma in the past two months. According to several people he’s been in contact with, he’ll write long, philosophical text messages to people he knows well, but others who reach out pushing him to run get elusive text messages that are noncommittal but friendly and make reference to decisions that lie ahead.
[Read: Beto O’Rourke and the new Democratic purity test]
That’s more contact than Nate Lerner ever had with O’Rourke—and he isn’t talking to him these days. Lerner came up with the concept for Draft Beto in late November, feeling like O’Rourke was the only solution to the country’s disenchantment with politics. He was an Obama 2012 reelection-campaign field organizer in Pennsylvania and now runs the Build the Wave PAC, which raises money and support for candidates by sending out mass text messages. He started reaching out to people he knew about Draft Beto, building a network of support and attention. It’s gotten big enough already that many people mistake Draft Beto for part of O’Rourke’s operation directly and misinterpret every utterance from the group as a window into his thinking.
That, Lerner says, is the point.
“It’s more to show him that that energy’s there and that it’s real, and also to keep him in the news and to keep his supporters engaged, provide an outlet for him,” Lerner said.
This week, Draft Beto branched out with an expanded list of experienced operatives around the country, and more are expected to be named in the coming days. With a big Democratic field taking shape for the 2020 election, experienced operatives are in high demand. It’s notable that so many are willing to sign on with Draft Beto when they could be taking paying jobs with candidates who are actually running.
[Read: Beto’s loss was a blessing in disguise for Democrats]
“We have stepped out on a limb of our own volition, and people have assumed that we may be crazy, because there are people who are actively putting together teams and we went with the guy who is not,” said Brown, the former South Carolina state legislator, who was brought into Draft Beto by his friend Tyler Jones, an operative in the state who just ran Joe Cunningham’s campaign to flip a House seat blue in November. Jones himself was brought into the group after Lerner reached out to him.
Brown said that since he signed on with Draft Beto, he’s been flooded with messages on LinkedIn and so many emails that he’s turned off the notifications on his phone. County parties have invited them to speak on O’Rourke’s behalf, as have chapters of College Democrats in the early primary states. Brown said he’s also had success persuading some political players and donors to hold off picking a candidate until they see whether O’Rourke runs. “What we’re doing is making sure he doesn’t lose out on anybody while he takes his time,” Brown said.
But Draft Beto wants to attract more operatives, and Lerner is hoping that the video out Thursday will help the cause go viral. The video is set to the synth keyboard intro to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” which O’Rourke famously rocked out to in a campaign video shot while he waited in line at a Whataburger drive-through in Texas after one of his Senate debates with Ted Cruz.
The new video features clips of him decrying what’s become of American politics, interspersed with shots of President Donald Trump and the Trump rogues’ gallery of Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, and more. It then shifts to shots of people all over television talking about him before segueing to a gallery of photographs of him in his old punk band or with his children. There’s a clip of him saying, “We’re going to shine through at this moment of division,” and it ends with a collection of inspirational moments from last year’s Senate campaign and his concession speech in November, promising that “we will see you out there, down the road.”
Since losing, O’Rourke has waffled on his campaign-trail pledge that he wouldn’t run for president in 2020 and has made almost all his public statements since in Facebook Live chats, including one last week, after Trump’s national television address on the government shutdown, and another from the chair of his dental hygienist.
Draft Beto has been casting about without him. To fit with O’Rourke’s no-PAC-money rule from the Senate campaign, the group worked with a campaign-finance lawyer to establish an account that holds the money they’ve raised. Those funds would be transferred to him within 10 days of his announcing as a candidate.
Draft Beto’s organizers don’t have access to any of the money themselves for operating costs or salaries, wary that people might otherwise accuse them of trying to make money off his name. Nor do they have talking points from him or his staff. But they have coalesced around his most important public statements and provide them to anyone who reaches out and asks about hosting house parties to drum up support. They also provide tips on how to get coverage in the local press and how attendees should be sure to take pictures to help fan the flames on social media.
“We’re not going to be able to provide a ton of guidance, but we’re going to be able to get it off the ground,” Lerner said.
Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles–based political consultant who signed on this week, first heard about Draft Beto from a friend who attended his birthday party recently. The friend was Michael Soneff, who’d just signed on as the Nevada and California director for Draft Beto—and who, a few weeks later, called Trujillo and asked him to sign up.
Now Trujillo is spending a little time each day trying to make more connections. He reached out to Mandate Media, a firm that worked with O’Rourke when he was in the House, to see whether they’d sign up to work for Draft Beto. He put in a call to the former chair of the Latino caucus in California, seeing about support.
After working on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, Trujillo said O’Rourke’s freshness pulled him in—and that, anyway, he hasn’t been impressed enough with any of the other candidates to leave other clients behind for them. He hopes this translates to a job on a campaign, if there is one.
“This is our way of raising our hands and saying through the press, ‘If you’re ready to jump in, here we are,’” Trujillo said.
“Draft” movements don’t have a great track record. For the 2004 election, several websites and small groups urged retired Army General Wesley Clark to join the race, comparing him to Dwight Eisenhower, raising money, and building email lists for him. After about six months, Clark jumped into the race, but his campaign lasted only about six months.
In 2015, a more experienced group of operatives and activists at the group MoveOn.org launched Run Warren Run, trying to persuade Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to enter the primaries. She never bit, and eventually they gave up, announcing that though “we’ve illustrated the huge opening that exists for her, we’re resting our case and will stop actively trying to draft her into the race.”
Meanwhile, a few young, inexperienced campaign workers put together a group called Draft Biden to try to persuade Joe Biden, then vice president, to run. They raised more than $100,000, commissioned meme-ready, Obama-style graphics of Biden driving a car, and became a point of contact for those close to Biden, who they hoped would convince him to run. As it turned out, the people who actually worked on planning a potential Biden campaign didn’t even know who the organizers were.
The people working on Draft Beto say they hope to be more like Ready for Hillary, a group founded in January 2013 that built up a massive email list and other resources. It was eventually absorbed by her campaign. But that was with much more time than O’Rourke has right now to decide whether he’s going to pull the trigger.
Adam Parkhomenko, the Ready for Hillary founder, said he’d advise the Draft Beto team to raise money for its own operations to pay for signs, stickers, and other materials that it can start handing out at events, at least until O’Rourke has a campaign operation that can produce those. “They could be filling a vacuum at all these events,” Parkhomenko said.
Based on his own experiences after Ready for Hillary folded, Parkhomenko also recommended that Draft Beto remain active as a separate entity, even if some of the people involved move over to a campaign staff. “The vast majority of them can be most useful to him on the outside,” Parkhomenko said.
Lerner said he and others involved with Draft Beto have been discussing three options for what to do if O’Rourke does launch a campaign: fold, redirect to another cause, or function as a supportive PAC so long as an official campaign doesn’t feel that would hurt his brand.
Lerner envisioned a scenario in which O’Rourke waits a few months to decide and then enters as a kind of white knight. That would spark excitement, of course, but would also come at the cost of not putting together an operation while all the other candidates get even more of a head start than they already have.
“Hopefully, we would have established the building blocks for that kind of approach,” Lerner said, then paused for a moment. “I’d love for him to announce in February as well.”
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this month that the United States should tax income over $10 million by 70 percent, it galvanized something unusual: a broad and substantive national conversation about the design and purpose of federal tax policy.
No, I’m just kidding. It kicked off a lot of screaming about socialism, especially on cable news.
From the cacophony of communist callouts, however, a subtler argument emerged. Entrepreneurs and center-right economists insisted that raising taxes dramatically on the rich would undo America’s ability to spark innovation and attract entrepreneurs who want to start companies and solve big problems.
In the abstract, their case is clear. “If income taxes are high enough, start-ups stop happening,” said Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the country’s preeminent start-up incubator.
[Read: Is the U.S. due for radically raising taxes for the rich?]
That perspective is backed by some research. A 2018 paper by Charles I. Jones at Stanford University Graduate School of Business found that raising the top marginal tax rate to 75 percent would “reduce innovation and lower GDP per person in the long run by about 6 percent.” Another recent paper found that the introduction of the income tax in 1909 suffocated innovation in the next 100 years. The conservative economists R. Glenn Hubbard and Douglas Holtz-Eakin each published papers earlier this century arguing that raising taxes on the rich “discourages entry into self-employment” and makes self-employed people less likely to hire workers.
Although it seems doubtful that an individual would choose not to start a company for fear of tax consequences should she become a millionaire—the horror—let’s give this argument its fairest shake. If high incomes are the prize that motivates entrepreneurs, high marginal rates weaken the prize and make it harder for new firms to scale up. Plus, reducing entrepreneurship in one generation might deplete the supply of start-up advisers and investors for the next.
Now let’s lift our eyes from theory and look out into the real world. Does it reflect conservative logic?
I don’t think so.
The two most important hubs of innovation in the United States are the Bay Area and New York City. But according to the Tax Foundation, California and New York have the 48th and the 49th most favorable business-tax climates in the country. Sky-high tax rates in Mountain View and Manhattan haven’t blunted their advantage. Average tax rates on most income groups have been declining since the early 1980s, which you’d think would supercharge start-ups, but the official entrepreneurship rate in the United States has been falling over that entire period. The United States has lower marginal tax rates on income than much of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development does, but the U.S. entrepreneurship rate is lower than those of many Western and Central European countries. When the top marginal tax rates were about 90 percent in the 1950s and ’60s, the U.S. productivity rate was higher, men landed on the moon, and scientists invented the internet, satellites, and the transistor, planting the seeds of the entire computer revolution that now defines innovation.These anecdotes don’t prove anything magical about high marginal rates, or low marginal rates. Rather, they suggest that if taxes matter, other stuff matters more—such as culture, local professional networks, and the state of scientific research.
As John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve, once told me, economists can’t rule out the possibility that productivity has slowed down recently because “we picked all the low-hanging fruit from the information-technology wave.” If capitalist entrepreneurs want to pluck new fruits of innovation, he said, somebody needs to plant new seeds of scientific research.
[Read: The golden age of rich people not paying their taxes]
The U.S. government used to do this well. Fracking, which has made the United States the world’s energy leader, came from federally funded research into drilling technology. The latest surge in cancer drugs came from the War on Cancer, announced in 1971. But the U.S. government doesn’t plant seeds like it used to. Federal research spending has fallen from nearly 12 percent of the budget in the 1960s to 4 percent today. If economists want to jump-start innovation in new frontiers, maybe they should obsess more about federal research spending than about a tax rate that would kick in at $10,000,000.01.
Another reason to worry less about marginal rates is that taxes collected from rich people are not boarded onto a spaceship and blasted at the sun. They help to support a range of services and benefits, some of which can make innovation more likely. Conversely, a lack of benefits can depress innovation.
In fact, one reason for America’s relatively low rate of start-ups may be that, since most adults get health care from their employer, they’re tethered to their day job. Some economists call this “entrepreneurship lock.” Universal public insurance might unlock ideas that are sequestered by the employer-sponsored health-care model. Relatedly, young people might not try to start a company because they are afraid of failure in a country without much of a social safety net. In one recent survey, more than 40 percent of 25-to-34-year-old Americans said a fear of failure kept them from starting a company in 2014—almost twice the number who said so in 2001. Higher taxes would likely help, not hurt, this cohort, if they were spent on, say, lowering the cost of public colleges, which would in turn reduce student debt and make it easier for middle-class graduates to take a risk on a new idea.
Entrepreneurs aren’t just born tough; they’re born lucky. The majority of successful young founders come from affluent white families, and they often piggyback on the professional connections and business expertise of their parents. Taxing the rich and distributing their income would do nothing to change the networks or tutelage of rich families, but it would reduce precarity among middle- and lower-class families, thus helping nonaffluent children become founders without doing much to punish their richer peers.
If Ocasio-Cortez wanted to destroy the American culture of innovation, she wouldn’t propose a barely applicable marginal tax rate, which exists within a larger tax code, which itself exists within a larger fiscal policy. Instead, she would reduce research funding, protect employer-sponsored insurance to keep tomorrow’s founders locked inside today’s cubicles, and increase student debt to make youth entrepreneurship more precarious. Oh, wait.
“My brother and my sister don’t speak to me, but I don’t blame them,” James Blake sang on loop for 2011’s “I Never Learnt to Share,” a defining moment in one of the 21st century’s most improbably important music careers. It was an evocative bit of poetry (what did you do at playtime, James Blake?) that, he said, was mostly selected for how it sounded rather than what it said. As keyboards wiggled, wheezed, and died around his lonesome whimper, the listener could guess at what it meant for Blake, an only child, to sing about siblings. Or they could just enjoy it as a mantra, dissolving the pesky idea of meaning itself.
Blake has become an influencer mostly through pure sound. The moody electronic styles of the U.K. legend—the hollow thwacks of garage, the algorithmic swarms of IDM, the black-hole heaviness of dubstep, the hiss and friction of grime—found new audiences when Blake lovingly fused them with hangdog falsetto, churchy harmonics, and structures that were not quite dance and not quite pop, but rather sculptural. The computer-generated ooziness of so much mainstream production now owes something to the artist, and superstars keep calling on him for tasteful helpings of digital wear and tear. Beyoncé, for example, took a sonic sketch by Blake and charged it with political and personal subtext on Lemonade: exactly what his music does not require on its own.
But on his fourth album, Assume Form, the 30-year-old Blake has lots to say. A few years into a relationship with the actress Jameela Jamil, Blake wants the world to know that he’s no “sad boy.” He also seems to want to reclaim his influence with some big hits of his own. As he sings on the title track, he’s leaving “the ether” so as to be more direct, warmer. It’s a sometimes awe-inspiring but often awkward transformation, that of a one-time Pinocchio who’s super-duper eager to inform strangers that he’s a real kid. Late in the album comes one tellingly clumsy line, delivered with Coldplay-ian intonations, plainly thirsty to be paired with Instagram sunsets: “Drop a pin on the mood that you’re in.”
No Brasil atual, as pessoas estão ou inspiradas ou apavoradas com a chegada de Jair Bolsonaro à Presidência – e, para entender o que pode acontecer em seu governo, eu acredito haver uma história que deve ser explorada antes, porque essa é a única forma de enxergar um futuro. Nos últimos oito anos, viajei pelo mundo inteiro me informando sobre a guerra às drogas (e as alternativas à guerra às drogas) para o meu livro “Na fissura: uma história do fracasso no combate às drogas”, recém-publicado pela Companhia das Letras. Eu estive em lugares com as políticas mais brutais em relação a usuários, dependentes e traficantes de drogas (como o Vietnã, o norte do México e os Estados Unidos); e fui a lugares que descriminalizaram todas as drogas (Portugal) ou as legalizaram (o estado do Colorado, Uruguai e Suíça). Há seis lições desta guerra global que explicam a ascensão de Bolsonaro – e o que acontecerá se ele fizer tudo o que prometeu durante sua campanha eleitoral.
Lição um: A guerra às drogas cria uma guerra pelas drogas.O Brasil tem mais de 60 mil assassinatos violentos todos os anos, e a população está certa em se enfurecer e exigir mudanças radicais que resolvam essa catástrofe. Esta foi uma das principais razões pela qual tantas pessoas apoiaram Bolsonaro: elas acreditavam que ele, pelo menos, falava sobre o problema da violência massiva, e que tinha um plano para resolvê-la.
Mas, para entender por que o plano dele não funcionará, nós precisamos, em primeiro lugar, entender o que está causando metade dessa violência.
Para começar, faça um pequeno experimento mental. Imagine que você está em Chicago e decidiu roubar uma garrafa de vodca. Se você for até uma loja de bebidas, colocar a garrafa embaixo do casaco e os donos da loja te pegarem, eles vão chamar a polícia e a polícia virá e te levará. Assim, a loja em si não precisa usar violência; ela não precisa ser intimidadora; eles têm o poder da lei sustentando seus direitos de propriedade.
Agora, imagine que você está em Chicago e quer roubar um pacote de maconha, ou cocaína, ou metanfetamina. Se a pessoa que te vende a droga te pegar roubando, ela não vai chamar a polícia – ela iria presa. Ela vai lutar com você. Agora, se você é um traficante (e eu passei um tempo com vários deles durante o tempo de minha pesquisa), não precisa ficar comprando brigas todos os dias. Você precisa estabelecer uma reputação por ser tão assustador que ninguém ousaria te desafiar. Na verdade, você precisa estabelecer o seu lugar enquanto vendedor e resistir a seus rivais através da violência. Como o escritor Charles Bowden disse, a guerra às drogas cria uma guerra pelas drogas.
Maria Lucia Karam, importante juíza brasileira, calcula que 30 mil dos assassinatos no Brasil todos os anos são um resultado direto desta guerra pelas drogas criada pela proibição.
Lição dois: Onde quer que tenha sido experimentada, a proposição de Bolsonaro aumenta os índices de mortes.Bolsonaro argumenta que a solução para tal violência é dar à polícia poder para executar qualquer um que ela suspeite de vender drogas. Execução extrajudicial, em si, é uma forma de assassinato, e nós sabemos que os atingidos por isso serão, em grande maioria, homens pobres em favelas – mas há também evidências de que essa tática aumentará o índice geral de mortes, além dos assassinatos cometidos pela polícia.
Há evidências de que autorizar as execuções extrajudiciais aumentará o índice geral de mortes, além dos assassinatos cometidos pela polícia.Imagine que você é parte de uma gangue de traficantes, como o PCC, que dominou as favelas de São Paulo, onde passei um tempo recentemente. Você travou uma guerra contra seus rivais e, através da violência e da corrupção de autoridades locais, obteve controle. Se a polícia vier agora e te matar, isso simplesmente gera uma disputa sobre o controle do seu território. É o primeiro tiro disparado para uma nova guerra – onde grupos rivais lutam para ganhar o seu território. É por isso que, invariavelmente, imposições policiais violentas sobre gangues do narcotráfico causam um aumento nos assassinatos em geral.
Isso não significa, é claro, que nós devemos deixar gângsteres violentos dominarem os territórios. Significa que devemos escolher as soluções mostradas que realmente funcionaram.
Lição três: Há uma maneira real para acabar com a guerra pelas drogas e a enorme violência que ela causa – e é o oposto do que Bolsonaro propõe.Se você quiser saber quanto dessa violência é um resultado direto da decisão de proibir as drogas, então se pergunte: onde estão os violentos traficantes de álcool? O dono da Smirnoff atirou no rosto do dono da Budweiser? O bar local mandou que adolescentes atirassem no bar rival do outro lado da rua? Não – mas exatamente isso aconteceu durante a Lei Seca nos Estados Unidos. Todos sabiam quem Al Capone era. O que mudou? Não a droga – o álcool é hoje o mesmo que sempre foi. O que mudou foi que a droga foi legalizada. O professor Jeffrey Miron, de Harvard, mostrou que os índices de assassinatos nos Estados Unidos aumentaram massivamente quando o álcool foi banido – e caíram massivamente quando o álcool foi legalizado.
Eu estive em lugares que legalizaram as drogas. Não há nada de abstrato na forma como eles fizeram isso. O estado do Colorado legalizou a maconha. Ela é agora vendida em locais licenciados e traficantes de maconha perderam seu espaço pouco a pouco. A Suíça legalizou a heroína e agora não há traficantes violentos de heroína no país (e houve um total de zero mortes relacionadas à heroína legal em quinze anos desde que ela foi legalizada).
Algumas pessoas dizem que acabar com a guerra às drogas é suficiente para países desenvolvidos como a Suíça e Portugal, mas que isso não é relevante para um país como o Brasil. “Eu acho ainda mais importante” aqui, disse-me a juíza Maria Lucia Karam. “Porque na Suíça ou em Portugal, eles não têm a violência”. Eles não têm quase 30 mil pessoas sendo mortas pela guerra às drogas ano após ano após ano.
Bolsonaro está oferecendo uma falsa solução para a violência. Mas há uma solução real em espera para quando o país quiser escolhê-la.
Clientes consomem maconha em coffee shop de Amsterdã, na Holanda.
Foto: Continental/AFP/Getty Images
Quando eu cheguei ao Brasil, peguei um táxi para o meu hotel, deixei minhas malas na recepção e fui dar uma caminhada na praia de Ipanema. A primeira coisa que um brasileiro me disse, após o motorista de táxi e da recepcionista do hotel, foi dita por um homem que viu um ‘gringo’ caminhando pela praia e veio confiante até mim dizendo: “E aí amigo – quer comprar cocaína?”. Todos os dias, pessoas ricas na praia de Ipanema estão comprando e usando drogas.
No dia seguinte, eu fui ao Complexo do Alemão, uma favela não muito longe de Ipanema, e um extraordinário jovem ativista chamado Raul Santiago me acompanhou e me mostrou o lugar. Eu vi a polícia apontando armas abertamente a crianças pequenas. Eu os vi aterrorizando a população. Eu conheci famílias de pessoas que foram executados extrajudicialmente pela polícia. Eu descobri que eles dirigem tanques pelas ruas da favela.
Algumas pessoas estão usando drogas tanto em Ipanema quanto no Complexo do Alemão. Se a polícia e os militares se comportassem por um dia em Ipanema da mesma forma que eles se comportam no Alemão, seria uma das maiores manchetes do mundo naquele dia. Imagine se eles enviassem um tanque para a praia de Ipanema e começassem a atirar em qualquer pessoa suspeita de estar usando drogas.
Qual é a diferença? As pessoas no Alemão são tão humanas – e tão merecedoras de segurança e respeito – quanto as de Ipanema.
Nenhum país pode impor leis de drogas contra todos que as infringem. Nos Estados Unidos, cerca de 50% da população já agiu fora da lei. Nenhum país pode aprisionar metade de sua população. Então o que acontece? O estado sempre usa a guerra às drogas como um pretexto para fechar o cerco contra aqueles que deseja reprimir por outras razões. Nos EUA, são os afro-americanos, os latinos e os pobres. No Brasil, é a população das favelas. Bolsonaro já expressou seu desprezo por eles, dizendo que as mulheres de lá não são nem “boas para reprodução mais”. Agora a guerra às drogas fornece um pretexto para aterrorizar essas pessoas.
Certo dia, eu estava sentado no centro de uma favela chamada Maré, bebendo Coca-Cola Zero com uma jovem ativista de lá chamada Maïra Gabriel Anhorn. Ela me explicou que seu grupo de ativistas locais – que consiste basicamente em um grupo de pessoas da própria favela da Maré – estavam tentando provocar mudanças explicando para as pessoas que elas têm direito a segurança. A população entendia muito bem que educação era um direito, que saúde era um direito, mas quando se tratava de segurança ser também um direito, eles se perdiam. Eles haviam sido ensinados, durante todas as suas vidas, que essa insegurança generalizada, essa violência extrema, eram necessárias como parte da guerra às drogas. O estado tinha que travar uma campanha massiva de violência. Era necessário.
Maïra descobriu que “toda vez que você tentava criticar as operações policiais, a resposta era ‘Mas é um lugar muito inseguro, há muitas pessoas que vendem drogas’”, disse. “E para as pessoas aqui, essa é uma desculpa aceitável. Essa é a única desculpa que torna essas operações violentas aceitáveis – porque aqui há pessoas que compram drogas.”
A genialidade da guerra às drogas, disse Maïra, é que ela, como nenhuma outra, permite uma guerra aos pobres que a sociedade como um todo, e mesmo muitos dos próprios pobres, aceitarão como necessária.
Maïra acredita que acabar com a guerra às drogas pode ser uma coisa boa por diversas razões – mas uma delas é retirar de cena uma desculpa para essa guerra brutal de classes conduzida pelo estado. Está claro o que está acontecendo – e por quê. E, uma vez que essa lógica estiver clara para todos, diz, nós podemos lutar contra.
Lição cinco: Ir atrás de pessoas com crise de dependência piora o vício.Os aliados de Bolsonaro, como o então prefeito de São Paulo, João Dória (recém-empossado governador do estado), reagiram às pessoas com dependência com violentas medidas repressivas – e essa parece que provavelmente se tornará a estratégia de Bolsonaro.
Em 2017, enquanto pesquisava para meu livro, “Na fissura”, eu passei um tempo na conhecida “Cracolândia” da cidade, onde muitos dos dependentes mais vulneráveis do Brasil acabaram por viver nas ruas. No começo, essas pessoas foram ameaçadas e agredidas pela polícia. Toda vez que isso acontecia, o problema só piorava. Então, durante um curto tempo, um interessante experimento foi conduzido por um grupo chamado De Braços Abertos.
Eles já haviam aprendido que a forma como a dependência química normalmente é pensada no Brasil é ultrapassada.
Se você tivesse me perguntado oito anos atrás, quando eu comecei a pesquisar para “Na fissura”, o que causa o vício em drogas, eu teria olhado para você como se você fosse um idiota e respondido: “drogas, né”. Não é difícil de entender. Eu pensei que havia visto isso a minha vida inteira. Todos podemos explicar. Imagine se você, eu e as próximas vinte pessoas que passarem por nós na rua usarmos uma droga muito potente durante vinte dias. Há componentes químicos viciantes nessas drogas, então se parássemos no dia vinte e um, nossos corpos precisariam daqueles químicos. Nós teríamos um desejo feroz pela droga. Nós estaríamos viciados. É isso que dependência significa.
Uma das formas em que essa teoria foi estabelecida pela primeira vez foi através de experimentos com ratos – introduzidos no pensamento norte-americano nos anos 80 em um famoso cartaz da Partnership for a Drug-Free America (Parceria para uma América sem Drogas). Você deve se lembrar. O experimento é simples. Coloque um rato em uma gaiola, sozinho, com duas garrafas de água. Uma contém apenas água. A outra contém água misturada com heroína ou cocaína. Quase todas as vezes que esse experimento é feito, o rato fica obcecado com a água drogada e segue voltando para beber mais e mais, até acabar morrendo.
O cartaz adverte: “Apenas uma droga é tão viciante, que nove entre dez ratos de laboratório as usam. E usam. E usam. Até que morrem. Ela se chama cocaína. E pode fazer o mesmo com você.”
Mas, nos anos 70, um professor de psicologia em Vancouver chamado Bruce Alexander, percebeu algo de estranho nesse experimento. O rato é colocado na gaiola completamente sozinho. Ele não tem nada para fazer exceto usar das drogas. O que aconteceria, ele se perguntou, se tentássemos de forma diferente? Então o professor Alexander construiu o Parque dos Ratos. É uma atraente gaiola onde os ratos teriam bolas coloridas, a melhor comida de ratos, túneis para passear e vários amigos: tudo o que um rato da cidade poderia querer. Alexander queria saber: o que aconteceria?
No Parque dos Ratos, todos os ratos obviamente provaram a água de ambas as garrafas porque eles não sabiam o que tinha dentro delas. Mas o que aconteceu em seguida foi surpreendente.
Os ratos com vidas boas não gostavam da água drogada. Eles a evitaram, consumindo menos de um quarto do que os ratos isolados haviam consumido. Nenhum deles morreu. Enquanto todos os ratos que estavam sozinhos e infelizes se tornaram usuários frequentes, nenhum dos ratos que tinha um ambiente feliz em torno de si o fez.
A melhor maneira de reduzir o vício seria diminuir a dor profunda que os dependentes químicos sentem.Há diversos exemplos humanos que mostram o mesmo princípio. Isso me fez perceber: o oposto da dependência é a conexão.
Após descobrir isso, a organização De Braços Abertos argumentou que a punição aumenta a dor e, portanto, a dependência e que, na verdade, a melhor maneira de reduzir o vício seria diminuir a dor profunda que essas pessoas sentem. Então eles compraram alguns hotéis baratos e forneceram às pessoas da Cracolândia um lar seguro, comida e emprego – em vários casos, pela primeira vez em suas vidas. A melhor pesquisa sobre isso mostrou que, como resultado, 65% deles reduziram o seu uso geral de drogas. O oposto da dependência é a conexão. Quanto mais pessoas puderem ser ajudadas a viver vidas significativas, conectadas e seguras, mais sairão do vício.
E logo quando o experimento da De Braços Abertos estava tendo resultados promissores – assim como havia tido em todos os lugares ao redor do mundo onde havia sido experimentado, de Vancouver a Lisboa – Dória foi eleito e decidiu acabar com tudo. Ele enviou a polícia para agredir os residentes e demoliu um prédio com três pessoas dentro. Como resultado, o problema da dependência química em São Paulo está mais fora de controle do que nunca.
Lição seis: O Brasil pode fazer escolhas melhores.A única coisa que pode ser dita em defesa da guerra às drogas é que os Estados Unidos realmente deram a ela uma oportunidade justa. Eles gastaram trilhões de dólares; eles o fizeram por cem anos; eles mataram centenas de milhares de pessoas (e destruíram países inteiros como a Colômbia); eles aprisionaram milhões dos seus próprios cidadãos; e qual é o resultado? Eles têm a pior violência armada no mundo depois do Brasil. Eles têm a pior crise de dependência química no mundo. E eles não conseguem nem manter as drogas fora de suas prisões.
Sob o governo de Bolsonaro, parece que o Brasil vai de novo copiar lugares que falharam desastrosamente, como os Estados Unidos. Mas há uma alternativa. O Brasil poderia começar copiando lugares que deram certo. Por exemplo: Portugal descriminalizou todas as drogas e transferiu o dinheiro usado para destruir a vida das pessoas de forma a ajudá-las a reconstruir suas vidas. Desde então, houve uma grande queda nos índices de dependência e overdoses.
Você não precisa ser vidente para saber o que a proposta de Bolsonaro vai fazer com o Brasil.Em todos os lugares onde a guerra às drogas foi superada, eu vi o mesmo padrão. De primeira, é extremamente controverso e as pessoas pensam que é loucura – e então elas veem os resultados. Não é perfeito – eles certamente ainda têm problemas no Colorado, em Portugal e na Suíça – mas há uma melhora tão radical que a oposição às reformas simplesmente deixa de importar.
Você não precisa se tornar um vidente para saber o que a proposta de Bolsonaro vai fazer com o Brasil – você precisa apenas olhar para o outro lado do mundo. Para ver o caminho além de Bolsonaro – o caminho que genuinamente reduz os horrendos índices de assassinatos e dependência química do Brasil – você precisa manter o olhar global. As soluções foram testadas. Elas estão esperando o Brasil escolhê-las.
O livro “Na fissura” foi lançado no Brasil no fim de 2018 e está disponível nas livrarias de todo o país.
Tradução: Maíra Santos
The post A guerra às drogas não funciona. O que podemos aprender com o seu fracasso? appeared first on The Intercept.
Last March, Rio de Janeiro City Council member Marielle Franco, a rising star in left-wing politics who regularly spoke out against police violence and corruption in her city, was assassinated by a gunman in an attack that also claimed the life of her driver, Anderson Gomes. Ten months later, no one has been arrested for the crime.
Now, however, six witnesses have identified a former officer in the police’s special operations unit as the man who pulled the trigger, according to a police report reviewed by The Intercept. The individual named in the report had previously been expelled from Rio’s Military Police force for involvement with one of the city’s main organized crime syndicates and has since became a full-time mercenary for illegal gambling rings, dirty politicians, and anyone else willing to pay for his services. His specialty: murder.
Last November, the Brazilian news channel Globo TV published two stories about the contents of the police report reviewed by The Intercept. But a state judge subsequently issued a gag order prohibiting Globo from publishing or reporting any more details from the document. Due to the sensitivity of the ongoing homicide investigation, The Intercept has decided to not disclose the suspect’s name.
Franco was killed as she was being driven home from an event on the evening of March 14, 2018, when a car pulled up alongside hers and unloaded a spray of automatic gunfire. The 38-year-old politician and her driver were instantly killed. The attack had been carried out in a carefully chosen location, and surveillance cameras at a nearby metro station had been switched off prior to the crime, suggesting a shocking level of sophistication and giving rise to speculation that powerful figures were behind the assassination. In the days after Franco’s killing, tens of thousands of mourners flooded the streets of Rio and cities across the country and around the world in acts of solidarity, creating massive pressure on authorities to solve the case that has not abated.
The witnesses cited in the police report had concluded that the hitman didn’t act alone. This would be in line with the way the suspect is known to work. The police wrote in their report that they believe at least two other former special operations officers from the same force — the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, known as BOPE — were involved in the killing.
BOPE VeteransIn Brazil, each state has a military and civil police force. BOPE, an elite unit within Rio’s Military Police force, was founded in 1978 to carry out hostage rescues and other lifesaving operations, but evolved into an urban warfare unit with numbers in the hundreds. Its members are known as “caveiras,” or skulls, and the unit’s sometimes brutal ends-justify-the-means approach to its work has been immortalized in films and cheered on by Brazilians who favor a tough law-and-order approach to societal problems.
The main suspect, an ex-captain, already had close ties to organized crime when he enrolled in the Dom João VI Military Police officers’ academy.It is an open secret that some BOPE officers also work for organized crime. Like the main suspect, the two other former BOPE officers are elite soldiers trained at taxpayer expense who now market their deadly skills to the highest bidder. One of them is a colleague of the main suspect from their police academy days, according to the Civil Police report.
The main suspect fingered by the witnesses, an ex-captain, already had close ties to organized crime when he enrolled in the Dom João VI Military Police officers’ academy before joining BOPE, according to the police report. Officials have long known that criminal syndicates recruit individuals to enlist in and infiltrate the police ranks. These individuals then run protection for organized crime, both on the streets and internally as informants.
The ex-captain got his start this way, working for “bicheiros,” illegal gambling clans, according to the Civil Police’s report, but the homicide detectives ruled out the possibility that bicheiros were responsible for Franco and Gomes’s murders. Instead, the police believe that the individual or individuals who ordered the crime are part of a militia, a type of paramilitary group comprised of current and former police officers, firefighters, soldiers, and municipal guards.
Photo: Sipa via AP Images
The Intercept reported last May that the main suspect had ties to BOPE, and the weapon used in the crime — likely one of three types of imported submachine guns — was rare on the streets in Brazil, but part of the arsenal of special ops commandos.
The Civil Police’s Homicide Division first arrived at the name of the suspect by interrogating potential witnesses and fleshed out their suspicions by reviewing unsolved investigations into the executions of two former police sergeants, Geraldo Antônio Pereira and Marcos Vieira de Souza. Souza, known as “Falcon,” was the former president of the Portela samba school and, at the time of his murder, was running for city council. Executed in 2016, both Pereira and Falcon had been investigated for involvement with militias and bicheiros.
In the case of Falcon’s killing, witnesses at the time told detectives that four hooded men carrying assault rifles conducted the hit. The group pulled up in front of his campaign headquarters in a silver Volkswagen Gol, and three of them got out of the vehicle, but only two entered the building. Falcon, unaccompanied by his security guards, was shot dead with bullets to the chest and head, before the assassins fled in their vehicle. More than two years later, detectives still have not identified the killers or the motive for the crime.
With these clues in hand, the most experienced investigators in the Civil Police were able to draw up a short list of those capable of organizing such clean hits.Pereira was also gunned down by assault rifle. His murderers used vehicles with cloned license plates and were exceedingly careful to leave no clues behind, exhibiting a level of sophistication on par with the attack on Franco and Gomes.
With these clues in hand, the most experienced investigators in the Civil Police — well-acquainted with Rio’s underworld — were able to draw up a short list of those capable of organizing such clean hits. On that list was the crew of former BOPE officers, including the ex-captain. Police investigators then hit the streets, concentrating their efforts in the region of Rio das Pedras, in Rio’s West Zone, where the former BOPE captain leads a crew of mercenaries. After scouring the area for security camera recordings, they finally located footage of the Chevrolet Cobalt used in Franco’s assassination. The car had been filled up at a gas station in Rio das Pedras on the eve of the crime.
“Ghost Weapon”Franco’s killers employed a bevy of sophisticated measures to cover their tracks, including the use of what are known as “ghost weapons,” according to the Civil Police report.
The strategy is simple. For instance, as with the spoils of war, corrupt police are known to assemble arsenals of arms seized in the course of their work, usually from operations against drug traffickers. Most weapons are turned in, kept in the custody of the state, as is required by law. But the best pieces seldom make it to the Civil Police warehouse — they are diverted to the private stockpiles of dirty cops. Sometimes, these illegal caches are stored in the armories that the Military Police battalions operate out of.
The quantity and size of these arsenals is unknown, since there are no police records and most of the arms are imported illegally by organized crime groups. Suspecting that a “ghost weapon” had been used in Franco’s killing, Homicide Division detectives ordered all 9mm submachine guns to be collected from Military Police units, including BOPE, and undergo ballistics testing.
Militias and a City Council MemberWithout enough material evidence to directly link the former BOPE captain’s posse to Franco and her driver’s assassinations, the Civil Police detectives dug deeper into unsolved homicide cases in which they thought the group of former BOPE officers might have been involved. In addition to the deaths of ex-sergeants Pereira and Falcon, the investigators dusted off the files on the 2011 murder of José Luiz de Barros Lopes, known as “Zé Personal,” and the April 2017 killing of Myro Garcia. The victims in those cases were, respectively, the son-in-law and son of the bicheiro moneyman Waldomiro Paes Garcia, known as “Maninho,” who was himself killed in September 2004.
After following the threads of these investigations, the police and prosecutors’ office opened a separate investigation last October into the involvement of militias in illegal land grabs and clay mining in the city’s West Zone.
The investigation produced enough evidence for warrants to obtain the banking, telephone, and personal records of Rio City Council member Marcello Siciliano, according to court documents obtained by The Intercept. The case also resulted in a search warrant on his house and office.
In court filings, prosecutors argued that Siciliano had participated in more than 80 real estate transactions involving land in areas dominated by paramilitary groups over the last 10 years. The documents also cite a negotiation between Siciliano and a businessperson involved in clay mining, whose brother was arrested on charges of militia involvement. The city council member has publicly denied any association with paramilitaries and said that the real estate negotiations were legal and registered in a notary’s office.
According to an O Globo report in June, Siciliano had been accused by at least one witness of having ordered the hit against Franco, but Siciliano has vigorously denied any involvement. The allegation, according to the O Globo story, came from a witness who is not named. In their account, the witness said Siciliano was associated with a well-known militia member, who the witness said was asked to do the hit on Franco. In his denial, Siciliano said he did not even know the militia leader.
This week, however, the militia leader’s driver was arrested on unrelated homicide charges and, according to another O Globo report, told police that he drove his boss to meet with Siciliano on multiple occasions — contradicting Siciliano’s previous claim.
Less than a month after Franco’s killing, a staffer in Siciliano’s city council office was gunned down in Rio, along with a retired police officer. Both had alleged militia ties. At the time, police sources told The Intercept that the killings may have been an attempt to “burn the records” — silence individuals who may have been involved or knew too much about the assassinations.
Franco’s mentor and political ally, Marcelo Freixo, has publicly cast doubt on this theory. “I do not see the possibility of Marielle’s death having any connection with our work with the militias,” Freixo told O Globo. “If the [public security] secretary says that the motivation is the land issue or is the question of the militias, this statement has to be accompanied by evidence.”
Photo: Wilton Junior/Estadao Conteudo/Agencia Estado via AP
Ten months after the executions of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes, the Homicide Division and the Public Ministry at last seem close to putting together all of the pieces in this intricate puzzle. Gen. Walter Braga Netto, who led the federal government’s takeover of Rio’s public security apparatus until the end of last year, told the O Globo newspaper last week that investigations into the death of Franco and Gomes are advanced, and the results would come “soon.”
“I could have announced who we think it was, or told Richard” — Gen. Richard Nunes, the former secretary of public security — “to do it, but we wanted to do a really professional job,” he said at a military event in Brasília.
Whether these pieces end up fitting together, however, may be up to Rio Gov. Wilson Witzel, who took office this month after promising during his campaign to “slaughter criminals” and end the civilian secretariat that oversees state police forces. This week, Witzel posted a video of himself leading a session of pushups at BOPE headquarters. Last year, a viral photo from a campaign event showed Witzel, microphone in one hand, the other raised in a fist, standing on stage next to two other candidates who proudly displayed a Marielle Franco street sign they had broken in half.
The post Who Killed Marielle Franco? An Ex-Rio de Janeiro Cop With Ties to Organized Crime, Say Six Witnesses in Police Report appeared first on The Intercept.
Foi nas fileiras do Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar que o principal suspeito de assassinar Marielle Franco e Anderson Gomes se aperfeiçoou nas técnicas de matar pessoas. Expulso da PM por envolvimento com um dos principais clãs da máfia do jogo do bicho no Rio, o ex-capitão do Bope, então, passou a trabalhar exclusivamente como mercenário de bicheiros, políticos e quem mais estivesse disposto a pagar por seus serviços. Sua especialidade: matar.
O Intercept Brasil teve acesso ao inquérito que a Justiça proibiu que a Rede Globo divulgasse. Nele, ao menos seis testemunhas citam o policial como assassino da vereadora e do motorista. Por considerar que a divulgação do nome do suspeito poderia atrapalhar as investigações, o Intercept, que leu o documento por intermédio de uma fonte envolvida na investigação e que pediu para não ser revelada, decidiu mantê-lo anônimo.
Seu grupo paramilitar tem ao menos outros dois ex-caveiras, homens altamente treinados – capacitados numa unidade de elite mantida com nossos impostos –, que desvirtuaram o aprendizado em troca de dinheiro. Um deles é também ex-oficial, parceiro dos tempos de academia, conforme o inquérito da Polícia Civil. Ambos tiveram participação no assassinato de Marielle, de acordo com o inquérito. O Bope foi criado para atuar em resgate de reféns e salvar vidas, mas se tornou uma ampla tropa de guerra urbana e, não é segredo para ninguém, alguns de seus policiais trabalham para o crime organizado.
A elite da tropa do crimeO ex-capitão apontado pelas testemunhas como autor dos disparos já mantinha ligações umbilicais com a contravenção quando ingressou na Academia Dom João VI, o centro de formação de oficiais da Polícia Militar, de acordo com o inquérito. Posteriormente, fez o curso do Bope. Há tempos, a polícia sabe que os bicheiros recrutam e formam oficiais que paralelamente atuam na sua proteção. O ex-capitão entrou para o crime organizado dessa forma, mas a hipótese de envolvimento de bicheiros no crime contra Marielle e Anderson é praticamente descartada pela Divisão de Homicídios. Milicianos são os principais suspeitos de serem os mandantes do crime.
Foto: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images
O Intercept Brasil já tinha antecipado em maio do ano passado as suspeitas de o assassino ter ligações com o Bope, além das possíveis armas usadas no crime – justamente aquelas com as quais os atiradores de elite estão mais familiarizados.
Agora, a DH chegou ao nome do suspeito. Primeiro, por meio de depoimentos, depois, ao revisar inquéritos relacionados às execuções de dois ex-sargentos da PM: Geraldo Antônio Pereira e Marcos Vieira de Souza – o Falcon, ex-presidente da escola de samba Portela e, à época, candidato a vereador.
Pereira e Falcon foram executados, respectivamente, em maio e setembro de 2016. Ambos já tinham sido investigados por envolvimento com milícias e a máfia dos jogos. No caso de Falcon, testemunhas ouvidas pela DH na ocasião relataram que quatro homens encapuzados portando fuzis foram responsáveis pela execução. O grupo chegou ao seu comitê eleitoral em um Gol prata. Três deles saíram do veículo, dois entraram no comitê. Falcon foi surpreendido sem sua escolta de segurança e morto a tiros que atingiram o peito e a cabeça. Após o crime, os bandidos fugiram no mesmo carro. Passados dois anos da execução, a DH não conseguiu identificar os assassinos e a motivação por trás do crime.
Pereira também foi assassinado a tiros de fuzil, e os matadores usaram veículos com placas clonadas e não deixaram rastros, dinâmica muito parecida com o atentado contra Marielle e Anderson.
Os investigadores então foram a campo e concentraram esforços na região do Itanhangá, sobretudo em Rio das Pedras, onde o ex-capitão lidera um grupo de mercenários. Depois de rodarem a zona atrás de câmeras de segurança, eles conseguiram finalmente imagens do Chevrolet Cobalt usado pelos matadores da vereadora e de seu motorista. O carro foi abastecido em um posto de gasolina na área, na véspera do crime.
Arma fantasmaO bando age com sofisticação e, além de empregar placas clonadas, usa o que eles chamam de “armas fantasmas” para eliminar seus alvos, de acordo com o inquérito.
A estratégia é simples. Policiais corruptos apreendem armas em operações, geralmente contra traficantes. É um espólio de guerra. A maioria das armas são entregues ao estado depois de apreendidas, como requer o procedimento. Mas as melhores não são recolhidas ao depósito da Polícia Civil – são ilegalmente desviadas para a formação dos arsenais particulares dos maus policiais. Algumas delas seriam guardadas até mesmo nos paióis dos próprios batalhões onde eles atuam.
O tamanho desses arsenais é desconhecido, já que são compostos por armas sem apreensão registrada pela polícia e, em grande parte, importadas ilegalmente pelo crime. Foi justamente a suspeita do uso de uma arma fantasma nos assassinatos de Marielle e Anderson que levou a DH a solicitar perícia em submetralhadoras 9 mm recolhidas em unidades da PM, entre elas o Bope.
Miliciano, vereador, grilagem de terras, exploração de saibroSem provas cabais que liguem diretamente o bando do ex-capitão caveira à execução da vereadora e de seu motorista, a DH passou a revisar os casos de homicídios nos quais o grupo era o principal suspeito. Além das mortes dos ex-sargentos Pereira e Falcon, os investigadores também retornaram aos inquéritos sobre o assassinato de José Luiz de Barros Lopes, o Zé Personal, em setembro de 2011, e de Myro Garcia, em abril de 2017. Eles eram, respectivamente, genro e filho do banqueiro do jogo do bicho Waldomiro Paes Garcia, o Maninho, morto em setembro de 2004.
A estratégia de tentar encontrar pontos de ligação entre os suspeitos de envolvimento nas mortes de Marielle e Anderson em antigos inquéritos levou a polícia e o Ministério Público a abrirem, em outubro passado, uma investigação separada que apura o envolvimento de milicianos na grilagem de terras e exploração de saibro na zona oeste.
A ação serviu de base ao pedido de quebra dos sigilos bancário, telefônico e de dados do vereador Marcello Siciliano, apontado por uma testemunha do inquérito de Marielle como mandante do crime. O processo resultou ainda na realização de busca e apreensão na casa e no gabinete do vereador do PHS.
Num trecho da ação, os promotores ressaltam que Marcello Siciliano participou de mais de 80 transações imobiliárias envolvendo a cessão de terras em áreas dominadas por grupos paramilitares nos últimos dez anos. O documento cita também uma negociação entre Siciliano e um empresário envolvido na exploração de saibro cujo irmão foi preso sob acusação de ser miliciano. O vereador negou envolvimento com paramilitares e afirmou que as negociações imobiliárias foram legais e registradas em cartório. Ele também nega ser o mandante do duplo homicídio. Pela linha de investigação, Marielle seria um entrave aos negócios do grupo, mas a polícia ainda não apresentou provas que sustentem a hipótese.
Hoje, Siciliano é o principal suspeito de ter encomendado o assassinato, em associação com o suposto miliciano Orlando Oliveira de Araújo, o Orlando Curicica. O vereador já depôs várias vezes, mas a polícia não o acusou formalmente pelo crime. De acordo com O Globo, um motorista de Curicica, preso por outro homicídio, disse aos investigadores que levou seu chefe para encontrar Siciliano pelo menos quatro vezes, o que contradiz a afirmação dos dois de que mal se conhecem.
Uma testemunha disse à polícia que, em um dos encontros, Siciliano disse a Curicica: “Tem que ver a situação da Marielle. A mulher está me atrapalhando”. Logo depois, o vereador teria dito que “precisamos resolver isso logo”. Segundo essa linha de investigação, assessores de Marielle estavam se alinhando com moradores da zona oeste que buscavam regularização de áreas que seriam do interesse do grupo de Siciliano.
Em 2018, Curicica foi condenado a quatro anos e um mês de prisão por posse ilegal de arma.
Menos de um mês depois do crime, dois homens foram mortos a tiros no Rio. Um trabalhava no gabinete de Siciliano, e outro era um policial aposentado. Os dois teriam ligação com milicianos, e, na época, fontes da polícia disseram ao Intercept que as mortes eram queima de arquivo.
Mentor de Marielle na política, o deputado estadual Marcelo Freixo, do PSOL, já colocou dúvidas sobre a grilagem de terras como motivação para o assassinato da vereadora. “Eu não vejo a possibilidade da morte da Marielle ter algum vínculo em relação ao nosso trabalho com as milícias”, disse Freixo em dezembro. “Se o secretário diz que a motivação é a questão fundiária ou é a questão das milícias, esta frase tem que ser acompanhada de provas”, afirmou.
O governador Wilson Witzel fez flexões no Bope na semana passada. Depois de participar de ato que quebrou placa em homenagem à Marielle, ele agora comanda a polícia que investiga sua morte.
Foto: Carlos Magno/Governo do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Dez meses depois das execuções de Marielle e Anderson, DH e MP parecem, enfim, estar sintonizados e próximos de reunir todas as peças desse intrincado quebra-cabeças. O general Walter Braga Netto, ex-interventor federal na segurança pública do Rio, disse no dia 11 ao jornal O Globo que as investigações sobre a morte de Marielle e Anderson estão adiantadas e que o resultado virá “em breve”.
“Eu poderia ter anunciado quem a gente acha que foi, ou dito ao (general) Richard (Nunes, secretário de Segurança Pública durante a intervenção, para que o fizesse), mas quisemos fazer um trabalho realmente profissional”, afirmou o ex-interventor num evento militar em Brasília.
O encaixe dessa peças, contudo, pode estar nas mãos do governador Wilson Witzel, que recentemente postou um vídeo fazendo flexões no Bope. No ano passado, ele participou de um evento no qual dois candidatos da última eleição exibiram como troféu a placa com nome de Marielle quebrada ao meio.
The post Seis testemunhas apontam ex-policial do Bope como assassino de Marielle Franco appeared first on The Intercept.
Trump administration prosecutors argued this week that members of the borderland faith-based organization No More Deaths broke the law by leaving jugs of water and cans of beans for migrants trekking through a remote wilderness refuge in the Sonoran Desert. The arguments came in the first of a series of high-profile federal trials in Tucson, Arizona, where humanitarian aid volunteers are facing prosecution under a litany of charges.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Wright, who is currently spearheading multiple cases against members of the humanitarian group, assured Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco that the evidence would clearly show that on the afternoon of August 13, 2017, four No More Deaths volunteers — Natalie Renee Hoffman, Oona Meagan Holcomb, Madeline Abbe Huse, and Zaachila I. Orozco-McCormick — broke the law when they drove onto the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, just outside the tiny town of Ajo, Arizona, and left humanitarian aid supplies for migrants passing through the region.
Christopher Dupont, an attorney for the defendants, argued that by devoting their time to putting out food and water in one of the world’s deadliest regions for migrants traveling on foot — where a minimum of 3,000 people have died making their way north since 2000 — the No More Deaths volunteers were acting on deeply held principles to confront a “crisis of the soul” that has turned much of southern Arizona’s most remote federal lands into a “veritable cemetery.”
There are currently two sets of separated but related cases stemming from a Trump administration crackdown on humanitarian aid volunteers in southern Arizona. The most serious charges have been leveled against Scott Warren, a 36-year-old academic, whom the government charged with three felony counts of harboring and conspiracy, for providing food, water, and a place to sleep to two undocumented men over three days last January. Warren faces 20 years in prison if convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms.
In addition to the felony case, Warren, who was not on trial this week, is one of nine No More Deaths volunteers accused of violating regulations on the Cabeza Prieta Refuge. Those cases are divided into three trials, with the first now underway.
Trump administration prosecutors are seeking to present the actions of No More Deaths volunteers on trial this week as straightforward violations of straightforward regulations. But hundreds of pages of internal government documents and communications, obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, map the deterioration of negotiations between No More Deaths and federal land managers, ultimately leading to the prosecutions.
The documents, many of which have taken center stage at this week’s trial, reveal the central role a supervisory official at a remote U.S. Fish and Wildlife office played in driving the prosecutions. They also show that, while Fish and Wildlife officers have been critical in collecting bodies in the Arizona desert, they have also actively removed food and water left by humanitarian groups in order to keep people from dying, while maintaining blacklists of the humanitarian volunteers that placed the supplies in the desert.
The newly released materials illustrate how generations of hard-line border enforcement measures collide with government wilderness preservation priorities, creating a situation in which thousands of people have died and the actions of those working to prevent further loss of life have been criminalized in the name of environmental conservation.
Federal Land Managers Crack DownThe No More Deaths trial unfolding in Tucson right now has as much to do with land management as with immigration. Two and a half decades of U.S. border enforcement policy has intentionally funneled generations of migrants into the sprawling landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Much of the area on the U.S. side is administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. military. But these Interior Department agencies, as well the Department of Defense, have largely escaped the scrutiny their Department of Homeland Security counterparts receive on matters of immigration — despite the fact that thousands of migrants have lost their lives on the lands these agencies administer.
Stretching along nearly 60 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, with its administrative office in Ajo, nearly all of the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge’s 860,000 acres are federally designated wilderness, making it the largest stretch of wilderness — a place where the impact of human activity is intended to be as limited as possible — in the state of Arizona. Bordered by the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range, which are managed by the National Park Service and the Defense Department, respectively, the refuge is one-third of a patchwork of federal land roughly the size of Connecticut that is devoid of any permanent human habitation. There are just three public roads on Cabeza Prieta, including El Camino del Diablo, or “the Devil’s Highway.” Used by indigenous residents of the Southwest for more than 1,000 years, the Devil’s Highway garnered national attention in 2001, when a group of 26 migrants became lost on the road. More than half died of dehydration or disappeared in the days that followed.
In 2014, amid a rise in missing persons reports coming in from the desert west of Tucson, No More Deaths began concentrating more of its humanitarian aid efforts in the so-called Ajo corridor, increasing water drops and exploration in the area. Soon, the number of human remains recovered in the region, particularly on Cabeza Prieta, began to increase. According to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, 19 sets of human remains were found on the refuge in 2015; 19 more were recovered in 2016; and 32 were found in 2017. In an email to The Intercept, Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist at the medical examiner’s office, said 40 of the 46 sets of human remains located by humanitarian groups in southern Arizona since 2000 were found after the 2014 push began, adding that “of these, 38 were in the Ajo District of our sheriff’s office, with most being west of Ajo” — namely, in Cabeza Prieta’s Growler Valley, where No More Deaths has focused much of its work.
No More Deaths’ expanded operations in the Ajo area brought the group into contact with Sidney Slone, the Fish and Wildlife manager of the Cabeza refuge. Slone did not return a request for comment Wednesday. In 2017, he declined to comment on The Intercept’s coverage of the No More Deaths cases, citing the likelihood that he will be called as a witness in the upcoming trials. On Wednesday, the land manager’s prediction came true. Slone’s testimony, coupled with the emails he sent during No More Deaths’ push, illustrate his concerns regarding the humanitarian group — a major factor that led to the prosecutions.
New Permitting ProcessAt the core of the current case is an adjustment to Cabeza Prieta’s permitting process, which requires visitors to initial a passage agreeing not to leave food or water on the refuge. The change went into effect on July 1, 2017, as No More Deaths’ work was helping to drive a record increase in human remains recovered on Cabeza Prieta. Emails show Slone workshopped the adjustment through the late spring and early summer of 2017, in consultation with regional Interior Department and military officials at the bombing range. As Slone later explained in an interview with the Arizona Republic, the “beefed up” measures were intended to “make it really clear so there’s no question in someone’s mind what the rules are.”
In his testimony Wednesday, Slone described the change in the permitting process as a “clarification” of existing rules, aimed at addressing the “ongoing issue” of No More Deaths volunteers leaving food and water on the refuge. “It was a joint effort,” Slone testified, explaining that the change involved input from regional Interior and Defense Department officials.
The consequential change came after an April 28 meeting in which No More Deaths volunteers and the group’s longtime attorney, Margo Cowan, met with Slone and Mary Kralovec, the assistant refuge manager at Cabeza Prieta, to discuss expanded humanitarian aid work on the refuge.
As the meeting approached, Slone emailed colleagues laying out his vision of humanitarian work and the people moving through the Ajo corridor. “I have told these organizations that I favor the deployment of more rescue beacons which Border Patrol puts out (at our urging sometimes) for the purpose of saving lives over them putting out water,” Slone said in an email to U.S. Fish and Wildlife colleague Beth Ullenberg. The land manager added that he preferred the use of fixed, 55-gallon drums of water in mutually agreed-upon locations to address the problem of migrants dying on the refuge. Humane Borders, another Arizona-based humanitarian group, has used such drums for years, including on Cabeza Prieta. Slone explained that he preferred the drums in part because they do “not include putting out food and clothing.”
Putting out food and clothing — or doing anything that might aid an individual in continuing to move through Cabeza Prieta — is a concern that appears repeatedly in Slone’s communications.Putting out food and clothing — or doing anything that might aid an individual in continuing to move through Cabeza Prieta — is a concern that appears repeatedly in Slone’s communications. Responding to a 2016 op-ed published on the anniversary of the 2001 Devil’s Highway tragedy, Slone told a Fish and Wildlife public affairs specialist that the “big problem” stemmed from the fact that most of Cabeza Prieta is designated wilderness and to put water where water is needed would require giving humanitarian aid groups access to administrative roads, thus threatening the protected areas.
What’s more, Slone said, groups like No More Deaths were already putting one-gallon jugs of water in the desert, adding trash to the refuge. “Even worse,” he said in the email. “They are now putting our [sic] protein shakes and canned foods. This is beyond saving lives, as the added food can help energize folks to hike another day or two, thus continue their journey. And unlike the deaths in 2001, almost all our illegal border crossing traffic on the Refuge is folks smuggling marijuana, not mom and pop looking for work.”
Slone, who this week testified that he is not a law enforcement official and does not have law enforcement experience, returned to the subject in March 2017, emailing the head of the Border Patrol’s Ajo station to express concern that the chief had told local residents that 95 percent of the “illegal traffic coming through the Ajo area” was “people looking for work and sanctuary,” while just 5 percent had to do with drug trafficking.
“I assume that they misunderstood what you said and that the opposite is true,” he wrote. “Many of these local folks putting out water and food think they are saving folks that are here seeking jobs or sanctuary. I tell everyone that the illegal traffic on the Cabeza Prieta is almost all drug smuggling.”
Negotiations Between Feds and HumanitariansThe April meeting between the Cabeza Prieta land manager and No More Deaths ended without a resolution, according to a summary of the conversation circulated by Slone and Kralovec. “In the end, they basically stated that they will do what they have to do and if we issue them citations, so be it,” Slone wrote, adding that the group was seeking a meeting with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tucson “to reach some accommodation.”
Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept
As the permitting change was being finalized, the monitoring of No More Deaths volunteers on Cabeza Prieta intensified. In early June, Warren, the No More Deaths volunteer charged with three felonies, was stopped on the refuge while doing a water drop and told that he had strayed onto designated wilderness with his vehicle. By mid-month, Slone was informing other land managers that a change was coming — one that would respond to No More Deaths specifically.
In a June 19 email to Cabeza Prieta staffers that was referenced in court Tuesday, Slone wrote that he was in consultation with “Air Force and refuge solicitors” on the coming adjustments. In the meantime, he said, Cabeza Prieta staff were to withhold giving permits to Warren and the three other No More Deaths volunteers. “If folks come in for a permit and it appears that they are part of the No More Deaths group, get myself or Mary to talk with them,” he wrote.
When asked how his staff was to determine whether an individual was affiliated with No More Deaths, Slone told the court that there are “a number of ways.” Often, the land manager said, the volunteers would come in groups telling “the same story” about their plans to make a short hike onto the refuge. But Slone apparently knew better.
“If they were with No More Deaths, they had intentions to go out and put water out,” Slone testified — and he simply could not let that happen.
Five days after the permitting change became official, No More Deaths volunteers and the group’s longtime attorneys took part in a conference call with Arizona authorities. This time, representatives from nearly all of the major land management agencies were included, along with prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tucson. In a briefing document based on the meeting, Fish and Wildlife official Yurie Aitken noted that the Justice Department said that, with regard to humanitarian aid in the Ajo area, “95% of issues between the Government and NMD are with Department of Interior.” Aitken’s notes added that the Justice Department stated, “Tickets issued are dismissed/not prosecuted if the person shows up to court (DOJ has them ‘Commit’ to not violate again).”
“Not much (if anything) was agreed to and nothing was really proposed. NMD gave an overview of their efforts and expressed common goals they would like to work with the Government on to save lives.”“Not much (if anything) was agreed to and nothing was really proposed,” Aitken concluded of the meeting. “NMD gave an overview of their efforts and expressed common goals they would like to work with the Government on to save lives.”
Aitken, too, appeared in court this week, taking the witness stand Wednesday morning. Under questioning from the No More Deaths defense team, he explained that his account of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s position on the prosecution of No More Deaths volunteers was based on the words of an assistant U.S. attorney, whose name he could not recall.
According to a sworn declaration submitted on behalf of the No More Deaths defendants last year, the prosecutor’s name was Larry Lee. For years, veteran attorneys with No More Deaths say they enjoyed a positive working relationship with Lee. In 2017, however, as the conflict on Cabeza Prieta was festering, Lee left Arizona for another job. Wright and Nathaniel Walters, both assistant U.S. attorneys, have taken over their office’s No More Deaths-related work. The two have been aggressively prosecuting those cases ever since.
On cross-examination Wednesday, Walters asked Aitken if anyone from the U.S. attorney’s offices had told No More Deaths volunteers that they had permission to enter Cabeza Prieta without permits, to drive on administrative roads, or to leave supplies on refuge grounds. Aitken said no.
Included among dozens of law enforcement incident reports stretching back to 2014, which were released to The Intercept, are grim accounts of Fish and Wildlife officers recovering bodies on the refuge, including both skeletal remains and the newly dead. In 2017, however, officers also began to describe encountering and removing humanitarian aid supplies on the refuge, and in at least one case, linking No More Deaths by name to the leaving of those supplies. As the encounters with his officers increased, Slone and his colleagues constructed a running blacklist of No More Deaths volunteers. A prominent figure on border issues in small-town Ajo, Warren was invariably the first person listed in the documents Slone had generated, though each of the current Cabeza Prieta-related defendants all eventually made appearances.
Throughout 2017, Slone regularly shared his expanding blacklists through email and formal letters with regional land management counterparts at the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Defense Department, urging them to join him in blocking No More Deaths volunteers from their lands. At one point, Randy English, an official at the military’s Barry M. Goldwater bombing range, reminded Slone that he could not pre-emptively bar individuals from receiving permits. “As discussed, until such time that they break the rules on BMGR West, I can’t really deny them a permit for BMGR West,” English wrote in a July email.
The Cabeza Prieta-related charges against the nine No More Deaths volunteers were simultaneously filed on December 6, 2017 — several months after the events in question actually took place — but it was clear as early as mid-summer of 2017 that Slone and other Cabeza officials hoped to see the No More Deaths volunteers punished in court. In a July letter to a Bureau of Land Management supervisor, sent the same day that No More Deaths volunteers met with regional land managers and U.S. attorneys in hopes of seeking a resolution, Slone said his office was “pursuing legal action against” Warren for driving on designated wilderness.
As The Intercept reported in September, Margot Bissell, a visitor services specialist at Cabeza Prieta, made similar comments in text messages to a local Border Patrol agent that same month.
Addressing his blacklists from the witness stand Wednesday, Slone testified that “folks on that list were folks that got caught violating rules and regulations.” He acknowledged, though, that not everyone who violates rules and regulations on Cabeza Prieta ends up on a government blacklist. Attorneys for the No More Deaths volunteers have argued that, in fact, Fish and Wildlife’s own records show that group’s members were specifically targeted. From 2015 to 2018, agents with the land management agency issued 14 citations for various violations of federal regulations or law in the Cabeza Prieta Refuge, the agency’s records show.
“None of these incidents were referred for prosecution or prosecuted, except for those involving No More Deaths volunteers,” the defense team noted in a September court filing.
Erasing Migrant DeathsOn Monday, before the current No More Deaths trial began, a hearing was held in Warren’s felony case that underscored a growing cloud of suspicion hanging over the No More Deaths prosecutions. At issue were secret communications, first reported by The Intercept, between government prosecutors and judge Velasco — the same judge Velasco overseeing the Cabeza Prieta-related cases.
Following the hearing, Warren’s attorneys filed a motion calling for “sanctions due to serious ethical violations” on the part of the Trump administration prosecutors. The lawyers argued for the indictment against Warren to be dropped, or at least for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona to be disqualified from the case.
As the No More Deaths trials go forward, the court will consider actions in a fixed time and place. But the subtext of the cases go much deeper, raising critical questions about the complicated interplay between law enforcement, land management, and humanitarian groups in a borderlands environment that has taken thousands of human lives. Two months before the Cabeza Prieta charges were filed, Warren, the No More Deaths volunteer now facing the greatest amount of time behind bars, published an essay in the South Atlantic Quarterly, an academic journal, addressing those issues head-on. Warren wrote that the work of humanitarian aid volunteers in southern Arizona does not aim to legitimize “the physical presence of smuggling organizations on public lands along the border.”
“Rather, humanitarian aid drops of water, food, socks, and blankets serve to acknowledge the struggle of migrants and force land managers and the public to recognize the ongoing humanitarian crisis,” he wrote. “Simply put, the very presence of humanitarian aid forces land managers to publicly acknowledge a problem that they may wish to push into the remotest and least touristed areas of the desert, keeping it invisible to everyone but law enforcement personnel.”
The post As Trial Starts for Border Humanitarian Volunteers, New Documents Reveal Federal Bureaucrats’ Obsession With Stopping Activists appeared first on The Intercept.
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Hercules Brown grew up in a well-respected family in Adel. Residents remember him as a good kid. But then something changed. He became violent and mean. And he had several run-ins with the law. But when he got in trouble, nothing seemed to stick. Until the murders of Bennett and Browning raised new questions about the Taco Bell and the Patel murders too. When DNA comes back as a match to Hercules on a key piece of evidence, will it be enough to help Devonia Inman?
Liliana Segura: In Greek mythology, Hercules was the illegitimate son of a mortal woman and Zeus, the king of the gods. Zeus’ wife, the goddess Hera, was furious about the infidelity and vengeful toward Hercules. She sent two snakes to kill the infant in his crib. It didn’t work. He was so strong that he crushed them both. Growing up, the mythical Hercules was known for his size and strength and athletic prowess. He learned wrestling and horseback riding. But he was also musical. He played the lyre and sang. Eventually, he would also be known for his murderous temper. He wore a lion skin with the head still attached. It came up over his head like a mask. And he carried a club, his favorite weapon.
Jordan Smith: Hercules Brown, a man from Adel, Georgia, had a lot in common with the original Hercules.
Daniel Connell: The name was very fitting. He was usually the biggest kid in our grade, very big, strong kid.
Jordan Smith: That’s Daniel Connell. He grew up in Adel and he still lives there. He’s a lawyer now. He went to grade school with Hercules Brown. They weren’t exactly best friends, but it was a small town and they were in the same grade.
Daniel Connell: Good athlete for the most part. He was usually the biggest football player or the guy that could hit home runs before everybody in baseball. Very mild-mannered, very well-spoken.
Jordan Smith: This Hercules played music, too. He was in the Cook County High School band. He played the trombone.
Daniel Connell: He never got in trouble that I recall in high school, was polite to teachers, never went to parties or anything like that that I’m aware of.
Liliana Segura: But Connell had heard rumors about a dark side. That, at some point, Hercules had changed. That he started having issues with drugs– using and maybe dealing. He became known for his horrible temper.
Christy Lima: This boy had a violent streak in him and everybody in Adel knew that about Hercules. Everybody was scared of him.
Liliana Segura: That’s Devonia Inman’s old girlfriend, Christy Lima. Of course, she had reason not to like Hercules Brown. When Donna Brown was killed at the Taco Bell, she heard that Hercules, and not Devonia Inman, had been responsible. But she wasn’t the only one aware of Hercules’ violent temper.
Jordan Smith: The cops in Adel cops knew about it too. There were vicious and seemingly unprovoked attacks on random people around town. Then an attempted robbery. And more rumors– that he was selling drugs out of the drive-through window at Taco Bell where he often worked nights as a closer. But for all the trouble he managed to find, for a long time Hercules Brown also managed to escape any real consequences.
Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. And this is Murderville, Georgia. Were the rumors about Hercules true? That he’d killed Donna Brown and maybe even Shailesh Patel? If he’d killed Bennett and Browning at the corner store, was he the only person who could’ve killed the other two? And if so, how did he get away with it?
Liliana Segura: Police in Adel had arrested Hercules before. A couple of years before William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning were murdered the grocery store, Hercules was accused of dragging a woman he knew, the mother of a drug dealer, out of her car. And beating her up. Badly. A random witness had to pull him off of her. Tim Balch, the former Adel cop we’ve been talking to, remembers this incident. He was working at the police station when the woman came in to report the attack.
Tim Balch: It looked like she had been in a fight with Mike Tyson. Her eyes were shut. I asked her what had happened and she told me that Hercules Brown beat her up.
Liliana Segura: Hercules was charged with the assault. But the woman ultimately refused to cooperate. So the charge was dropped.
Jordan Smith: The next year, there was an even more violent attack. Hercules knocked a man from his bicycle and beat him in the head so savagely that the man went into convulsions. He had to be hospitalized. Hercules pleaded guilty to the assault and was sentenced to just a year of probation. Then there was the other grocery store robbery. Well, attempted anyway. Less than two months before Bennett and Browning were bludgeoned to death. Balch was working that day too. He got a call from one of his confidential informants saying that two men were on their way to Harvey’s Supermarket with a plan to rob it.
Tim Balch: They all pulled up in the car, and I stopped it. Got Hercules out. There was a ski mask, a gun. Found crack cocaine in the car, and I arrested him.
Jordan Smith: Balch put him in handcuffs and into the back of the squad car. But then something happened.
Tim Balch: No sooner got him to the police station, which is literally six blocks away, before Mom shows up cussing me out about how her son would never have done any of this and that it was all planted and a big conspiracy by the police and all this, that and the other on him getting in trouble.
Jordan Smith: He was rescued by his mom.
Liliana Segura: It sounds ridiculous, but for people in Adel, Hercules’ mom, Lucinda Brown, was a pretty big deal. She worked for the state Division of Family and Children Services—the agency responsible for benefits like food stamps and for taking kids out of abusive homes. Some thought she took advantage of her position in order to protect her son.
Tim Balch: Now his mother was always very, very, very overprotective. Anytime something happened and his name was brought up, “Oh, it can’t be my son,” type thing. So, when he started getting in trouble with school, she was always down there raising cane, and it was always somebody else’s fault, which kind of, I think, led to a lot of the problems that he’s getting into now.
Liliana Segura: People in Adel were afraid to drop the dime on Hercules Brown in case his mother got mad. They were scared she would find a reason to deny them food stamps or other things they needed.
Jordan Smith: Or take their kids away.
Liliana Segura: And it wasn’t just regular people who worried. Balch says the cops tiptoed around her, too, because they knew they needed her. Especially with child abuse investigations. They were afraid of getting on her bad side.
Tim Balch: So when she would come down there and get angry, it was easy not to get angry back because you didn’t want the kids to be caught in the middle of it, so you’d take the abuse. With her, I held my tongue, you know, and that’s kind of the way things were.
Liliana Segura: We called Lucinda Brown. She was not interested in talking to us.
Jordan Smith: A lot of people have been saying some things that aren’t all that nice about your son and we really wanted to see if you could help us out, because we just don’t know what’s true and what’s not.
Lucinda Brown: Well you will never know what’s true and what’s not. So I don’t have anything to give you.
Jordan Smith: Now, not everybody remembers the Browns playing the system that way. We asked Kirk Gordon, the former chief of police in Adel, if Hercules’ mom was always saving his ass. According to his version, Hercules didn’t really need his ass saved.
Kirk Gordon: There wasn’t that many run-ins with the police, because Hercules, when he was in high school, was a good kid. I never had any problems.
Jordan Smith: Still, Gordon had known Hercules a long time. Since he was a kid. And he was aware that, at some point, he changed.
Kirk Gordon: I’ve known Hercules since he’s a puppy.
Jordan Smith: What happened to him do you think?
Kirk Gordon: Drugs.
Jordan Smith: Was it something you could kinda see happening?
Kirk Gordon: I couldn’t. I know that- I mean, in the drug world, no. I didn’t have an every day contact with Hercules. I knew his mom and dad real well, and his sister. Just super good people.
Jordan Smith: But Tim Balch says it was almost like Hercules wanted to be bad.
Tim Balch: He would say, “Oh, yeah. Well, I did that. The police are stupid. They never solved it,” and you don’t know- I mean he is very braggadocious and he’s always been that way since I’ve known him. I think I even told one of the GBI guys. I was like, “Well, you know, if there’s ever an unsolved murder,” I said, “I could get 20 witnesses that would come in here and say Hercules Brown said he did it,” because that’s the way that he was.
Jordan Smith: But the murders of Bennett and Browning were a different story.
Liliana Segura: The evidence against Hercules Brown for the Bennett-Browning murders was strong. Two witnesses, Lloyd Crumley and Corbit Belflower — a.k.a. Cornbread — saw him and another man fleeing the store just after the murders. They also recorded the license plate number of the getaway car, a car known to belong to Hercules. Less than an hour after the killings, cops pulled him over in that car. But none of that stopped Hercules from trying to deny he had anything to do with it.
Jordan Smith: The investigation was being led by Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent who’d handled the Donna Brown case. He’d talked to Hercules Brown during that investigation too, for about a hot minute. When Hercules was brought in for questioning in connection with the slaying of Bennett and Browning, Steinberg said he remembered him from back in 1998. Hercules feigned ignorance. Said his name was Al Railey. When Steinberg called in Jimmy Hill, the Adel PD detective, to positively ID him, Hercules relented. Yes, that was his name. But he swore he knew nothing about any double murder. He was booked into jail anyway. As police and prosecutors built a murder case against Hercules, there was one piece they couldn’t seem to figure out. Who was the second man with him that day? The man Crumley and Cornbread saw leaving the store and carrying a baseball bat? There was talk around town that the accomplice was Wesley Mason, a 21-year-old who lived not far from Bennett’s Cash and Carry and who worked with Hercules at the aluminum finishing plant in town.
Gail Bennett: I was very frustrated. As you know, it’s a small community.
Jordan Smith: Even the victim’s wife, Gail Bennett, had heard that Mason had a hand in her husband’s death.
Gail Bennett: We all knew who the second one was.
Jordan Smith: But it didn’t appear that Steinberg was in much of a hurry to figure it out. More than two months would pass before he finally brought Mason in for questioning. Mason denied any involvement and was released. Gail couldn’t understand it. She was frustrated. She pressed Steinberg for answers and she said he didn’t like that.
Gail Bennett: It took almost four or five weeks for the GBI to even talk to me. And that was after really showing my behind and sending letters and this and that and he came and he was very ugly and he looked at me and said, “I don’t have to tell you anything.” And I told him, I said, “No, Jamy, you don’t, but you will answer to my girls.” I said probably because of the connections we had, I probably knew more than he did.
Liliana Segura: None of this was exactly surprising. After Donna Brown was killed, Steinberg and his team ignored what they’d been told about Hercules Brown being responsible. Instead they cobbled together a sad array of questionable evidence to support their theory that Devonia Inman was guilty. And the family of Shailesh Patel says that the GBI didn’t even bother to talk to them for days after Patel was killed in April of 2000. The GBI still hasn’t solved that crime. And now, with the brazen murder of Bennett and Browning, Steinberg appeared to be sitting on his heels, ignoring the talk around town about Mason’s involvement.
Jordan Smith: I know you said Jamie said he didn’t have to give you any information, but did he ever explain anything about why it was taking so long?
Gail Bennett: Nope. They didn’t, they never would explain anything to me.
Liliana Segura: Part of the problem was Hercules Brown. He insisted he had nothing to do with the crime. So, naturally, he didn’t say a word about Wesley Mason. Even so, it seemed inevitable that Hercules would be convicted. Not only was there the positive ID by Crumley and Cornbread, there was also DNA evidence. The blood stains found on the white Nikes and blue jeans that Hercules was wearing that day matched William Bennett.
Jordan Smith: And after four murders, the people of Adel seemed ready for someone to pay. Charles Shiver works for the local paper, the Adel News-Tribune. He’s written a lot about crime, including the murders of Donna Brown and Shailesh Patel and the bludgeoning of Bennett and Browning. The ongoing violence had rocked the town.
Charles Shiver: It just seemed like the community was darkening, or I don’t know how to put it … At least some parts of it, you know?
Jordan Smith: In the summer of 2001, Devonia Inman had come within inches of being sentenced to death on far flimsier evidence than what the state had against Hercules and now the Bennett family was pushing hard for the death penalty. So just before his trial was scheduled to start, Hercules cut a deal with the prosecutors. He told them that Wesley Mason had helped him to rob the Cash and Carry and to kill Bennett and Browning. Actually, he said more than that. He said the whole thing had been Mason’s idea. Sure, he’d thrown the cash register at Lloyd Crumley. But that was Mason’s idea. And it was Mason who had beaten Bennett and Browning to death and who whacked the railroad conductor so hard that part of his scalp peeled back. Hercules said it was all Mason’s doing. In Hercules’ version of events, he was just a hapless victim too, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In exchange for his story, he was given a sentence of life without parole. Now, Wesley Mason was the only one facing a possible death sentence.
Liliana Segura: The prosecutors went for it, but there was every reason to question Hercules’ story. Apparently he and Mason knew each other only casually — as one tends to know everyone in a small town. So it was hard to imagine why Hercules Brown would agree to partner up with him to kill two people.
Liliana Segura: When police finally got Mason to talk, he flatly denied being involved in the murders. He said he went to the store with Hercules that day, but had no clue that anything was going to happen. Once they got inside the store, he said Hercules just went crazy.
Laura Mason: Hello?
Jordan Smith: Hi, I was trying to reach Laura Mason.
Liliana Segura: We tracked down Mason’s mom.
Laura Mason: Speaking.
Jordan Smith: Ms. Mason, My name is Jordan Smith and I’m a reporter-
Liliana Segura: She didn’t want to talk to us.
Laura Mason: You got the wrong person.
Jordan Smith: You’re not related to Wesley Mason?
Laura Mason: I am, but I don’t have anything to say, ma’am, I’m sorry.
Jordan Smith: Oh, did she hang up…
Liliana Segura: I think she hung up.
Jordan Smith: Yeah.
Liliana Segura: We all know about the right to an attorney and that if you can’t afford one, the state will provide one for you. But when a person faces the death penalty, a whole different attorney apparatus kicks in. Defense lawyers who specialize in fighting capital cases.
Jordan Smith: Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Wesley Mason was appointed two attorneys. They were two very different people, with very different experience. The lead counselor was a local guy. A prosecutor from a neighboring county who handled misdemeanors. The second lawyer was Josh Moore.
Josh Moore: Okay. My name is Josh Moore and I represent clients facing the death penalty all across the state, have done about 15 years now.
Jordan Smith: He’s actually the appellate director for the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender. It’s a state office with attorneys who represent indigent clients. That’s pretty much everyone facing the death penalty. He’s sharp and to-the-point. The kind of guy that you know does not suffer fools lightly. When Moore got appointed, one of the first things he worried about was that Mason couldn’t possibly get a fair trial. For starters, a prosecutor had been tapped to lead the defense. It sounds bizarre, but Moore says that’s just about par for the course in South Georgia. Then there’s the fact that the crime had captivated the town. There was a lot of local press about it, much of it angry and vengeful.
Josh Moore: You’re dealing with Cook County, Georgia. This is not a place where the judicial system runs in any kind of recognizable way to most lawyers, right? And so there was no, you know- the notion of Wesley Mason getting a fair trial in Cook County, Georgia was almost laughable.
Jordan Smith: Moore also needed to figure out whether his client was actually responsible for murdering Bennett and Browning. Because when two people are accused of committing a crime, who exactly did what can mean the difference between an acquittal and a conviction. Or in this case, between life and death.
Josh Moore: So we were dealing with a client who had professed his innocence to the police when they interrogated him but admitted his presence. And so the question was, how much of it was Wesley Mason and how much of it was Hercules Brown?
Liliana Segura: It didn’t take long for Moore to reach a conclusion.
Josh Moore: It was absolutely clear based on the evidence in this case that Hercules Brown was the primary moving force behind this case.
Liliana Segura: So he started looking more deeply into Hercules Brown. And pretty soon, he heard about another murder Hercules had supposedly committed.
Josh Moore: I started focusing on what I was hearing about Hercules Brown and very quickly I was hearing that Hercules Brown had committed a previous murder and that was the Taco Bell case that Devonia Inman was convicted for.
Liliana Segura: But he’d also heard another rumor. That Hercules might’ve been involved with the unsolved murder of Shailesh Patel.
Josh Moore: I think it was somebody, maybe an Indian fellow who got murdered, maybe like a television or an air conditioner smashed over his head. I can’t really remember it very well.
Liliana Segura: The Patel murder.
Josh Moore: That’s what people were saying about Hercules that he had committed both of those two murders prior to the Bennett murder.
Liliana Segura: Moore stepped up his investigation. If he could show that Hercules had blood on his hands already, it would, at the very least, suggest something about his propensity for violence. The investigation didn’t last long.
Josh Moore: I started aggressively investigating the Taco Bell case in fairly short order and Clark Landrum, who was lead counsel on the case, basically got wind of it, I think from the GBI agents. I mean, this is a guy who is a prosecutor so… and had said to me, “You’re a real curious guy. I don’t know why you keep looking into this stuff.” And I explained to him why I thought it was important and he said, “Well, I’m directing you to stop looking into it anymore. And I’m lead counsel and I make that decision.”
Jordan Smith: Yup. You heard that right. The man who was the lead attorney appointed to represent Mason told Moore to quit investigating something that could save their client’s life. Moore said that lawyer, Clark Landrum, even wrote him an official letter laying it all out. Moore couldn’t find the letter when we visited him. And for his part, Landrum told us in an email that Moore’s version of events wasn’t accurate, that he didn’t tell Moore to stop doing anything.
The whole thing came to a head in a meeting with the judge assigned to preside over Mason’s case. The judge himself tried to kick Moore off the defense team. Moore was indignant. His client didn’t want Landrum defending him. He wanted Moore.
Josh Moore: I had said to the judge maybe there’s some confusion here, but we’re representing Mr. Mason and we’re not asking for any money from you, so you have absolutely no authority to bar me from having contact with him, he’s my client. The judge eventually understood that he was not going to be able to stop that and just said, “Well, I guess there’s not much that I can do, but you better sure as hell not ask for any money from me because I’m not giving you any money, but if you want to keep representing him on your own dime, then do it.”
Jordan Smith: Moore ended up representing Mason for free.
Liliana Segura: But then, a deal. The District Attorney was Bob Ellis, the same man who had prosecuted Devonia Inman for the murder of Donna Brown. He made Mason an offer: Plead guilty and no death penalty. Instead, life in prison. Mason took the deal.
Josh Moore: As you have seen, I’m sure, in looking into this again, a lot of doors close in your face and so ultimately whether we were in a position to prove that he did this other murder or not, you know, we didn’t follow that trail all the way through to the end.
Liliana Segura: Of course, Josh Moore wasn’t the first person to hear that Hercules Brown had been responsible for the murder at the Taco Bell. Back then, a lot of people in Adel said it was him.
Jordan Smith: Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent, talked to Hercules the day after Donna Brown was murdered. It isn’t exactly clear why. He didn’t ask him much, save for whether he knew if Donna Brown had been having any man trouble. Hercules said, not as far as he knew. And that was it. According to the GBI report that was the only time anyone interviewed Hercules Brown. Nobody ever followed up. And we could never figure out why. We’d wondered about this from the start. Why did police and prosecutors ignore Hercules? It didn’t make any sense. Until we talked to Tim Eidson, one of the prosecutors who tried Devonia Inman. And we realized, again, it apparently came back to his mother. Lucinda Brown.
Tim Eidson: She gave an alibi for him. She gave an alibi and there wasn’t any reason to disbelieve her at the time, I mean, she was a well-respected citizen.
Jordan Smith: According to Eidson, this is what Lucinda told him.
Tim Eidson: At the time of the Taco Bell murder, Hercules Brown was at home asleep.
Jordan Smith: They never did anything to investigate or to corroborate her story, which is crazy. Imagine a murder in your neighborhood. There’s a suspect everyone is pointing at. And the police, they just ignore it. Because his mom tells them he’s at home in bed.
Liliana Segura: If they hadn’t been so quick to accept Lucinda Brown’s alibi for her own son, there would have been plenty to look at. But before we get into that, it might be useful to review the case against Devonia Inman. You might remember, it’s pretty flimsy. There’s the testimony of an incoherent drug dealer. Several teenagers who later recanted. Information from a jailhouse snitch who used the occasion to ask for leniency. And a newspaper carrier with a wholly unbelievable story who collected a five-thousand dollar reward for her “information.”
Jordan Smith: Then there’s the evidence against Hercules Brown. Hercules actually worked at the Taco Bell with the victim. He even handled the closing shift, so he would’ve known how the whole closing process worked. Then there’s the fact that Hercules actually talked about robbing the Taco Bell. Including Takeisha Pickett, one of his co-workers. Pickett is Devonia Inman’s cousin.
Takeisha Pickett: Me and him is the same age. We always been close. We always been close.
Jordan Smith: She worked as a night manager at Taco Bell for a while. One of the people she supervised was Hercules Brown. She says he tried to convince her to help him rob the place.
Takeisha Pickett: Yea, he gave me a ride home one night and then we came in for a little while. And that’s when he brought the conversation that was like, “Man, you should let me rob you one night,” or whatever. And I was like, “Man, there ain’t enough money to get robbed from there.” And, you know, we kind of- I brushed it off always and left it at that.
Jordan Smith: Neither the cops nor the GBI investigators took it any further than that. They didn’t investigate Pickett’s story and she didn’t get to testify at Inman’s trial. And she wasn’t the only one who told the cops they had information about the murder and then didn’t get to testify.
Liliana Segura: One man, Thomas Dewayne Edwards, a friend of Hercules Brown, even told the investigators that Hercules had confessed to him: Hercules told him that he shot Donna Brown with a single .44 caliber bullet. Edwards said Hercules told him that he wore a mask during the crime, because Donna Brown knew him as an employee at the Taco Bell. He said he wore a mask. Right after Donna Brown was killed, the cops found her car in a nearby parking lot. There was a lot of evidence in it—the keys, the purse, the fingerprints, and a mask, made from a piece of gray sweatpants.
Jordan Smith: At the time of the murder, nobody looked at it. In fact, nobody even realized it was there until nearly two weeks later. Even though you can clearly see it in the crime scene photos. And certainly, it was never tested for fingerprints or DNA. In 2002, Devonia Inman was in prison. Just starting his life sentence there. He was desperate and despairing. He wrote to the Georgia Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The lawyers there started looking into his case right away. They were astonished by the quality of the investigation—the recanting witnesses, the lack of physical evidence. They devoured the transcripts. And the police reports. And they began a search for evidence they could test for DNA. Finally, they found the mask, and in 2011, it was tested. There was DNA from a single source.
Liliana Segura: Hercules Brown. Aimee Maxwell, the former head of the Georgia Innocence Project, remembers the video of Steinberg interviewing Hercules Brown in prison about why his DNA might be on the mask.
Jamy Steinberg: Have you ever been with Devonia Inman and had a mask on? Because it didn’t come back with any other DNA, I mean it came back with…
Liliana Segura: In the video, Hercules sits on a bench wearing white prison scrubs. White cinder block wall behind him. His head is shaved, his face impassive. Sometimes he seems bored. Even as Steinberg backs him into a corner. At first, Maxwell says, she thought Steinberg was trying to feed Hercules the ‘right’ answer.
Aimee Maxwell: But, he says no I barely knew Devonia, he was an acquaintance.
Liliana Segura: Maxwell remembers him saying.
Aimee Maxwell: I knew who he was but we didn’t hang out. I’ve never given him a mask, he’s never taken a mask, and so by the end, I realized it was this genius interrogation because they gave him all the outs. He took none of them. So they backed him into a corner and he has no place to go from now.
Liliana Segura: There was basically no way for Hercules to argue that Devonia Inman had killed Donna Brown and that he, Hercules, was innocent. In 2014, Devonia Inman was finally granted a hearing to ask for a new trial, in light of the evidence that had emerged.
Jordan Smith: On the next episode of Murderville: Devonia Inman goes back to court. But will the new evidence exonerate him?
Liliana Segura: Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week.
The post Episode Five: Hercules Brown appeared first on The Intercept.
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In the wake of the 2018 midterms, the Democratic Party in Congress is looking a lot more diverse—not just in terms of gender and ethnicity, but in ideology as well. There are now actual leftists (a tiny minority, but still), with ambitious policy agendas and big social media platforms, making noise and taking no prisoners. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a self-declared democratic socialist, is among those newcomers. She wasn’t elected to Congress to manage the status quo; she was elected to overturn it. Rep. Tlaib kicks off season 3 of Deconstructed, joining Mehdi Hasan to discuss Palestine and the BDS movement, her plans for 2019, and the possible impeachment of Donald Trump.
Op-Ed referenced in this podcast: Now Is the Time to Begin Impeachment Proceedings Against President Trump, Detroit Free Press January 2019
Rashida Tlaib: We ran because being on the outside ring wasn’t going to be an option for us anymore, being silent wasn’t going to be an option anymore. People like us deserve a seat at the table and we’re at the table now.
Mehdi Hasan: Hello and a belated happy new year. I’m Mehdi Hasan, and welcome back to a new season of Deconstructed, for a new year. I hope you had a great break, if you had a break, and I hope you’re ready for an action-packed 2019. Is this the year President Trump finally—finally!— gets his comeuppance? Is this the year the Democrats finally grow a spine, and kick some ass? Some Congressional Democrats, new Congressional Democrats, are up for a fight.
RT: Look, it’s not a waste of time to hold the President United States accountable. We need to understand our duties as members of Congress and I believe looking at even Nixon’s impeachment, it was Republicans and Democrats coming together and putting country first.
MH: That’s my guest today, Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was sworn in on January the 3rd and grabbed the headlines instantly. So, on today’s Deconstructed, we’re taking a cue from the congresswoman and asking, among other things, when do we impeach the mother-[beep]?
2019 already looks like it’ll be as batshit crazy as 2018. I mean, where to begin? There was the big dinner at the White House this week for the Clemson Tigers national championship-winning football team. And when I say big dinner, I mean Big Macs, Quarter-pounders, Wendy’s Burgers, Domino’s pizzas. Yes, cold and shit fast food ordered by, and apparently paid for by, the President of the United States himself.
Donald J. Trump: We have pizzas. We have 300 hamburgers, many, many french fries, all of our favorite foods. I want to see what’s here when we leave.
MH: Sorry, which self-styled billionaire orders fast food for his guests and then brags about it on Twitter? Especially when that alleged billionaire owns a posh hotel down the road from the White House which serves gourmet steaks, but yeah, he’s too cheap to pay for that. Of course, the reason he had to get fast food in the first place was because of a lack of staff in the White House kitchen due to the government shutdown. A shutdown which is now the longest in U.S. history. Well done, Donald. What’s more, this is a shutdown which President Donald Trump told us was his shutdown. We all heard him say it to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office, on camera, just a month ago, a clip which the Democrats should be probably playing on a loop by the way.
DJT: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So, I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.
MH: But now — surprise! — he says it’s all the fault of the Democrats. That’s what he proclaimed in his live address to the nation from the Oval Office last week which the TV networks idiotically allowed him to give.
DJT: The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only: because Democrats will not fund border security.
MH: Perhaps he has amnesia. Or dementia. Or maybe he’s delusional. I mean, this is also the same president who told Fox News last Saturday:
DJT: Well, I haven’t actually left the White House in months.
MH: For months? Are you kidding me? He was in Texas just two days before that interview. He was in Iraq two weeks before that. Is he demented? Is he delusional? Is he just a fabulist? But I guess that’s always been the basic message from this reality-star president: Reality doesn’t matter. And anyways, who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
But I don’t just want to talk about Donald Trump today. I don’t. Even though I suspect we’ll spend much of this coming year talking about Trump, just as we did last year, and the year before that and the year before that. He’s taken over my life, professionally and personally. I want to talk about the Democrats today because not only is this the year that the Democratic presidential race heats up, and we had Senator Kirsten Gillibrand telling Stephen Colbert on Tuesday that that she plans to run too. Elizabeth Warren’s looking at a bid. Tulsi Gabbard has declared. Joe Biden’s testing the waters. But not only is this the year the Democratic race kicks off, in earnest, but it’s also of course, the year the Democrats can hold this president to account for the first time.
The new Democratic majority in the House is already locked in a struggle over the shutdown. You have Democratic committee chairs threatening to get the President’s tax returns and dig into his foreign dealings and corruption and emoluments. And you have some of the newest Democrats in the House making some of the most noise.
Representative Rashida Tlaib, the first ever Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, turned up at her swearing in ceremony in a traditional Palestinian gown, a thobe, which immediately started trending. That evening, though, she really grabbed the headlines when she said this at a meeting of liberal activists.
RT: When your son looks at you and says: “Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.” And I said: “Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.”
(cheers)
MH: Now whether or not you agree with the, uh, colorful language used there, are we supposed to be upset that a new Democratic member of Congress wants to impeach Trump, which is what a majority of Democratic voters want? By the way, Tlaib didn’t just give a speech and swear, she also co-authored an op-ed that day explaining why we don’t need to wait for Mueller or the Russia investigation to conclude. There’s already enough evidence in the public domain of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, campaign finance violations, the imprisonment of children at the border to justify impeachment.
But that was all lost in the brouhaha over her use of the M-word. Republicans were outraged. Outraged, I tell you! Yeah, are we really supposed to believe that the same Republicans who helped elect to office a president accused of raping his wife and sexually assaulting more than a dozen women, who was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women’s genitalia, who referred to African countries as ‘shithole’ countries, and who just last weekend was accused of telling his own chief of staff that he had “fucked it all up,” we’re supposed to believe that those same Republicans were offended or shocked by Rashida Tlaib’s remark? If you believe that, I have a degree at Trump University to sell you.
By the way, Trump claimed to be offended by Tlaib’s “disgraceful” use of the M-word, he said, even though here’s Trump speaking back in 2011.
DJT: Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re gonna tax you 25 percent.
MH: But worst of all is that not only did the media and the Republicans and Trump pile in on Tlaib, but so did some conservative and centrist Democrats too. Well, pretend Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia who said this on — where else — Fox News.
Joe Manchin: Oh, so disgusting. It was horrible, Neil. No one should approve of that. And I hope she doesn’t talk to her son that way either. To act like that, just awful, and to speak like that is even more deplorable. I’m so sorry. I want to apologize to all Americans.
MH: Sorry, Joe Manchin voted to put Brett Kavanaugh, a man accused of sexual assault by three different women, on the Supreme Court. Joe Manchin says he might vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Does he really think anyone gives a damn what his views are on bad language? I mean, seriously?
The reality is that the ludicrous Joe Manchins of this world are, thankfully, the past, not the future of the Democrats. In fact, the Democratic Party in Congress now looks a lot more like the Democratic base. In fact, it looks a lot more like America itself. And, crucially, it’s not just diverse in terms of ethnic or gender diversity, welcome though that is, but it’s more diverse in terms of ideology.
We now have actual leftists, still a tiny minority yes, but actual leftists, with ambitious policy agendas and big social media platforms, making noise and taking no prisoners. Rashida Tlaib, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a self-declared Democratic Socialist. She didn’t just get elected to manage the status quo, she got elected to overturn it. So earlier, I went to her new office on Capitol Hill to talk to Congresswoman Tlaib about her plans for 2019, her comments about Trump and her position on Palestine.
[Music interlude.]
MH: Rashida Tlaib, congratulations on your election, on being here in Congress making history. One of the first two Muslim American women and the first Palestinian American woman to be elected to Congress. I want to start by asking a question that’s been asked of some of your new colleagues as well. Do you consider yourself to be a radical?
RT: You know, first of all, it depends on what you know, how you would define radical —
MH: You define it.
RT: Different. I am different. I’m different in how I serve not just because of my faith, not because I’m, you know, an Arab-American woman with this unique name and just kind of a unique approach to public service. But I’m different in a sense that I come from the third poorest congressional district in the country. The fact that you know half of my colleagues before I got here are millionaires. They’re an income bracket that is completely disconnected with the American people.
I’m different in that I, you know, I’m a mother. I am a person that is dealing with student debt and all of the challenges that I think many of my residents are facing today in being brown or Black in our country. I think for those that say well that’s radical, sometimes I feel like that’s a way to dismiss the fact that I do belong here just like anybody else that this kind of approach to public service to me is a new era of the social justice movement that we have in our country right now.
MH: This year, 2019, is going to be a very, very busy political year. Probably busier than 2018 even. God help us all. What do you think? What, in your view, should be the number one policy priority for the Democratic caucus in the house in 2019?
RT: You know, I think for my district specifically it has primarily been around addressing poverty in our country. I think that is probably the pathway to true equality. So, many things are so connected to the issue of poverty.
MH: How though, what particular policies do you want?
RT: Absolutely. So, one of the things that —
MH: Hit me.
RT: So, my first bill is Justice for All Civil Rights Act. A lot of folks don’t realize in 1964, we passed this historical, beautiful Civil Rights Act of ’64 and what happened there over the last 50 years is the courts got more, increasingly more conservative. So, they decided you know what if we’re going to look at civil rights violation, then we have to — this higher threshold of intent in putting the burden on us. No, the impact of the policy in itself should be enough to say there’s a civil rights violation.
MH: I just saw on my way here on Twitter that you’re going to be on the Financial Services Committee. Is that confirmed?
RT: Yeah, it’s going to hopefully be confirmed soon.
MH: You and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Should the banks —
RT: And Maxine Waters.
MH: — Should the banks be afraid of you?
RT: They shouldn’t. They understand that, you know, it’s not personal. She knows — Maxine Waters is an unwavering advocate and she of anybody understands from being here longer than most of us on this committee, right, that she understands that there has been a lack of accountability and responsibility on Wall Street in what’s happened to our communities around economic injustices. And so much of it is tied with all the other issues that are in my district. I’m excited because having someone that is like you, that understands true public service has to be stemmed and connected, really rooted in what’s happening back home and she’s extremely rooted and understanding how painful poverty can be.
MH: There’s been some wins and some might say losses for your wing of the party, if I can call it that, since the new year. On the one hand, you had the Green New Deal rhetoric picking up. You had the new select committee on climate change that Speaker Pelosi signed off on which was seen as a victory for a lot of you guys pushing for that. On the other hand, some of my colleagues at The Intercept did a piece last week about how if you look at some of the key committee posts they’ve gone more to the “moderate centrist” than the members of the progressive caucus. How worried are you about how kind of “your wing of the party” shakes out over the course of this year with Nancy Pelosi and some of the more established Democrats still in charge at the top?
RT: I think Congresswoman Pressley said it beautifully to me is like, we’re here to be seen and heard. I don’t think we’re losing when we’re still here and we’re going to still be pushing back against this, you know, to me less courageous kind of approach to a lot of these very important policies. Even with the Select Committee, I’ve already convened over 35 advocates alone in Detroit and even those from Flint came. So many community advocates came together in saying what do we want a Green New Deal to encompass? Because even though we have this structure out there in saying that we need to move towards that, we also want to be able to make sure there’s co-ownership and oversight and all of those things. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to go and present to the Select Committee that this is the needs and the requirements and importance of the Green New Deal.
MH: But to having your voice heard, obviously, it helps if you’re on the key committees. It’s great you’re on Financial Services, if that’s confirmed, but for example, the Ways and Means Committee, the all-powerful committee that handles a lot of the finance stuff in this place. There’s not many progressives on it, you could argue.
RT: Yeah, I —
MH: Is that something that progressives back home in the wider public should be concerned about?
RT: I can already see us moving people more to the left, more to the issues that are important. You even hear them using some of the language that we use. I think people should be hopeful that we’re here. We’re not going anywhere and yes, we’re dealing just like we deal with the structures outside of the walls of the Capitol. We’re also dealing with some of the culture here, but the thing that the commonality that is so real and should be inspiring is that we’re pretty courageous and we haven’t backed down.
MH: So, you talk about putting pressure on the structures inside of here. You talk about moving people to the left. You talk about being courageous. How would you describe this movement, if I can call it that, by you and AOC and Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and others, some of the newbies coming in from the left? Is it fair to call it an insurgency?
RT: Not at all. I mean, I think a lot of us didn’t even know who each other were until we got here. I think we gravitated towards each other —
MH: Isn’t that how the best insurgencies begin?
RT: — But I think people need to understand it’s organic. It’s not something that was planned. Many of us, again, didn’t even know who each other were. We ran not to become first or anything. We really ran because being on the outside ring wasn’t going to be an option for us anymore, being silent was going to be an option anymore. So much much of our passion to run for office is that people like us deserve a seat at the table and I truly believe no matter what committee, we’re at the table now.
MH: And you, of course, hit the headlines. I can’t have this interview without talking about what you did a couple of weeks ago on the day you were sworn in —
RT: Of course not.
MH: — You had a great swearing-in. You wore the thobe. It trended.
RT: My kids dabbed.
MH: Your kids dabbed. It was historic in many ways. And then you told a crowd of activists that evening —
RT in front of crowd: We’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.
MH: — Referring, of course, to Donald Trump. The media went crazy. Cable news rolled on it forever. I think there was a study shown that they covered your comments five times more than they covered Steve King’s racist remarks in defense of white supremacy, Republican Congressman Steve King. You even had some Democrats kind of saying, we’re not happy with this, disowning you. Conservative Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, for example said what you said was deplorable and disgusting. What is your response a couple of weeks later as it’s all calmed down to some of that brouhaha?
RT: You know, I continue to say I’m unapologetically me. I have every right like anybody else not to stop the tears and the pain and to be honest, the anger that I have right now in our country of feeling less like I belong, right? And I think being in that room the passion, my passion got the best of me, but I also am really that raw and that real. And some people embrace that but some people want to focus more on: “She shouldn’t be saying that,” but at the same time —
MH: The language police.
RT: — Yes, but at the same time, I think you know, I’m not part of a movement like King is of, you know, white supremacy doesn’t belong in our country. Everyone knows that. But a girl from Detroit that cursed all of a sudden becomes the headline where I really was targeting towards around impeachment like I’m really eager to move towards that. But I think it was unfortunately, a distraction and for me —
MH: Very much media-generated, GOP-generated.
RT: Absolutely.
MH: Because of course, the Republican party don’t like swearing. That’s why they elected Donald Trump to the presidency who never, never uses any bad language. It’s funny because I was on, I was on vacation on the 3rd of Jan. and I saw that on my phone. It popped up on Twitter and I saw that and I kind of chuckled to myself because I wasn’t that surprised because I’ve seen you swear in public events before and is it fair to say that’s kind of who you are? Cause I swear in public too and my wife gets real upset with me and try not to swear when I’m on live TV.
RT: Obviously, I wouldn’t do it in a setting like on the Congressional floor or in the six years that I served in the Michigan legislature, I never cursed on the floor. But one of the things that I, you know, was interviewed three months ago on another podcast and it was on Detroit public schools talking about, you know, women running for office and at the end of the interview they said is there anything that people don’t know about you and I said: “I curse like a trucker,” you know. And the guy laughed but they reached out and they said: “Oh now everybody knows.”
MH: Now they know for sure.
RT: But yeah, I have, you know, dropped the F-bomb. I have had these moments but at the same time, it’s like people are — it’s like this moment that I think people —
MH: But it’s also you’re a brown woman so you shouldn’t. I think there was a lot of that. And Trump weighed in with the nonsense about honor.
DJT: Her comments were disgraceful. This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself and I think she dishonored her family.
MH: Which I don’t believe was accidental.
RT: He disgraces the office of the presidency every single day.
MH: On that note, talk substantively, you talk about it being a distraction from what you were actually talking about which was impeachment. And what a lot of people missed that day was you co-authored an op-ed in your local paper about making the case for impeachment and it’s a fantastic op-ed. I urge all of the listeners — and we’ll put up a link to it on the site — to go read it because what frustrates me and what frustrates me about the Democratic leadership and frustrates me about Schumer and Pelosi is if they’re asked about impeachment, they say let’s wait for Robert Mueller.
And what you so clearly lay out on that op-ed is you don’t need to wait for Robert Mueller. There’s enough stuff in the public domain. He does impeachable stuff on a weekly basis. So just for our listeners, briefly make the case for why you, what is the main case that you think is for impeachment? Putting Russia-gate to one side.
RT: Absolutely. The Constitution demands it and I want to reiterate to people to understand that this is beyond the collusion with Russia. This is beyond the Mueller investigation. Every single day that he’s President of United States that has not divested in all of his domestic and foreign corporations, he’s making decisions not in the best interest of the American people. He’s making it based on the profit lines. There is a slippery slope here. If we allow the president United States not to release his taxes and not to understand where his corporate interests are, then who’s next after him?
It causes a tremendous amount of fear, I think, for my residents back home and for myself and others that understand we now have a guy that still is sitting, in many ways, CEO of various interests foreign and domestic. And he’s making decisions, looking the other way, even on Saudi Arabia, looking the other way because of his investments.
MH: It’s open corruption.
RT: Absolutely, and that alone should be enough to start looking at impeaching this president.
MH: And do you believe that given what we know about the hush money payments by Michael Cohen, the obstruction of justice, the witness intimidation on Twitter, the misuse of pardon powers, all of which you mention in your piece, is it fair to call this president a criminal?
RT: You know, I am a person of — I’m a lawyer and I’m an attorney and I truly believe in the process. But I also believe, you know, if you’re given probable cause I mean, there’s already enough information out there to understand that a process needs to now —
MH: Of criminality.
RT: Absolutely, there’s been criminal acts currently, right now with him not divesting. That’s a direct violation of the Constitution not divesting into his corporate interests.
MH: And what was the backlash like to you from those comments? Not just to swearing but that you’re calling for impeachment being a new member of Congress. I was just sitting in your reception before this interview started and I heard your poor assistant on the phone fielding multiple calls in a 10-minute window from people hurling abuse, just ringing in to abuse you.
RT: Yeah, it’s not about the cursing. It’s about me impeaching this president.
MH: And being a brown Muslim woman who wants to impeach the president.
RT: You know, I don’t belong here. He’s the greatest president in the world, you know, in our history. Build the wall. You name it, it’s coming through. And they’re very loud and very direct. I mean, he has obviously erupted this kind of, you know, white supremacy kind of movement and people are saying things that are not reflective of who we are as a country.
MH: Do you worry about your security because just this week a Republican official in Florida claimed that you might blow up Capitol Hill which is the kind of rhetoric which might lead some nutcases out there to say: “Well, we must protect Capitol Hill from Rashida Tlaib.”
RT: Before I even talked about impeachment as publicly as I have been, on the first day of my orientation, we got a death threat. They don’t stop. I am taken aback by how aggressive and more public they are about wanting to harm me.
MH: Do you hold this president’s rhetoric responsible, at least in part, for those threats?
RT: Absolutely, he is the leader of our country. He sets the tone and you, even in rallies and other instances, he’s even said if impeachment continued, we’re going to see violence. We’re going to see — I mean, it’s almost like he’s sending out some sort of signal.
MH: Just on impeachment, what do you say to those people, including on the left who say: “Look, of course, he should be impeached. Of course, he should be removed from office. But the Democrats don’t have a majority in the Senate. You can impeach him in the House. You can’t convict him in the Senate. So, why waste time talking about impeachment when we can get on with Medicare-for-all and fighting climate change? Why waste time on impeachment?”
RT: Look, it’s not a waste of time to hold the President of the United States accountable. No matter what we pass, he’s the administration that has to implement it. So, if it’s not in the corporate interest of his own, you know, profit line, then he’s not going to implement it on the best interest of the American people. We need to understand our duties as members of Congress and I believe looking at even Nixon’s impeachment, or his literally, his resignation, it was Republicans and Democrats coming together and putting country first, coming together and putting our values first.
You’re seeing it now more and more. Even now, they’re standing up to Steve King. They’re standing up against this kind of rhetoric. Even the shutdown has come of an awakening. I even see it with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle finally coming on our side and understanding, we’ve got to open up government. You can see the self-interest. You can start seeing what many of us already have felt across this country that you do have a President of the United States that is acting above the law.
MH: You mentioned shutdown. One of the first bills, in fact, the first bill that Republican senators have decided to consider in this new year, this new Congress is a bill to criminalize the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement. It’s an anti-BDS Bill. Marco Rubio of Florida, has been pushing it. You criticized him on Twitter saying he and other colleagues “forgot what country they represent.” What did you mean by that? Because some of your critics on the right say you’re an anti-Semite for saying that.
RT: Of course, and it’s come before that comment. I — just my mere existence as a Palestinian here of speaking up against, you know, people taking away our First Amendment right of freedom of speech. Do you know what we’ve done in this country with the right to boycott, what we’ve done in this country with the right to speak up and to protest and to say we disagree with this country and their doings? You look at Apartheid. You look at all the, you know, anti-blackness in our country and what we’ve been able to try to do to push back against that, you know, I don’t even call it an anti-B — I call it anti-First Amendment, anti-speech bill.
MH: But the dual loyalty trope is an anti-Semitic trope. You weren’t referring to that, presumably.
RT: It’s ridiculous for those to somehow, the desperation and trying to tie that somehow, that I’m somehow anti-Semitic. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And to me, it was very much trying to deter the fact that they know, even those that understand that BDS is very much a right in our country to be able to say we want to boycott someone a country based on their political beliefs or their policies.
MH: And just on BDS, you and Ilhan Omar have come out in favor of BDS. The first-ever members of Congress to ever do so, what does that actually mean in practice for a member of Congress to be pro-BDS? Does that mean you can’t vote for any military aid to Israel? You can’t vote for — What does that mean you can’t do in terms of — because you’re actually a law-making position. It’s one thing for a member of the public to come out. I’m just wondering how that works. Does that mean you’ll be opposing all U.S. aid to Israel?
RT: I can tell you what I’ve been very specific about is that I will not be supporting aid to any country that is not for equality or justice. I have to tell you my grandmother lives there. By me supporting any aid to a country that denies her human dignity, denies her equality, the fact that she has to go and, you know, through checkpoints to get to the hospital for health care, the fact that she is felt as if she’s less than in her own country, that is something I will not be supporting.
MH: So you won’t be voting for the current annual U.S. military aid package —?
RT: It has to be for leverage. We do it to states all the time where we say: “Look, if we —” and I can tell you, I mean, people know this. If we are going to tell states they have to support the Civil Rights Act, they have to support the, you know, same-sex marriage, anything that we believe in, we say: “Okay, you want this money, then you’re going to have to support these values. You’re going to have to support the federal law.” If we’re not doing that to Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries, then we’re not doing our job as a country.
MH: Fair enough. One last question: A growing number of Democrats are now launching presidential bids, a record number of women too. Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand just this week. Do you have a favorite candidate yet?
RT: No, I’m really focused on the shutdown. I want you to know like even when I go to the, I came through the airport, it’s so, all of it right now, is not even in my purview. Like I look at this stuff and every time I see it, I just kind of pass through and I’m like —
MH: But it’s important. It’s not unimportant, obviously, who the candidate of your party to take on Trump.
RT: Of course it’s important but think about it, right now, there’s like more federal workers going to pawn shops to pawn off their goods because they’ve got to be able to make some sort of living. I don’t know. I’m so focused on that right now, and to be honest —
MH: But you were a Bernie supporter in 2016.
RT: Yes, but I —
MH: Would you encourage him to run this time? Even if you’re not coming out in favor of someone.
RT: I can tell you this is a man that has a tremendous amount of courage. He started talking about universal healthcare and supporting the right to boycott and the understanding that women deserve equal pay and all of those things and that’s something that I’m very passionate about. He has moved our country more and more towards these issues. That to me is real leadership and I support any of my colleagues who want to run but I hope they use that national stage, right now, at this moment, to get our government back up and running.
MH: Rashida Tlaib, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
RT: Thank you.
MH: That was congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan speaking to me in her Capitol Hill office. Don’t you wish we had more plain-speaking politicians like that? And I’m not just referring to her swearing. I’m talking about the directness of the approach, the willingness to call things what they are.
And you know, I’m pretty cynical about politicians. I’m as cynical as they get. I’ve been covering politics on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly two decades now and you know, I know that politicians just say whatever they want to say to get elected or to get ahead. But with this new crop of Democrats, leftist Democrats in the House, I do have a little bit of hope. I am allowing myself to be hope-filled and I think you should too. By the way, who says voting never changes anything?
That’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept, and is distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review. Go right now and review us! It helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much! It’s great to be back. I hope you think so too.
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